can we capture (grab) xorg clipboard information directly without pressing middle button?

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@post.harvard.edu>]

Hi,

I am curious. Lets say I highlight some text,  in a document and it "gets sent to the clipboard". (xclipboard seems to be a client
not the clipboard itself).

Is there a way to capture that data directly, without middle click into a text destination, so that I can then
manipulate that data with a program, perhaps tied to a hotkey sequence.

Here is a use case.

I have a big document that I will want to do a regexp manipulation on and then paste. Can I do that in one step
by binding to a hotkey sequence?

Where is the data stored after I highlight text??

Mitchell