The ability to copy & paste is probably one of the most requested features still absent from the iPhone. Whenever word of an update gets out, it’s a safe bet that one of the first question amongst the comments will be “They put in copy/paste yet?”

Well, it’s still not in yet – but Apple might be working on it. While digging around the iPhone SDK, an unnamed developer stumbled across a handful of strings referring to Copy/Paste functionality within the WebKit framework.

It’s not quite time to party just yet, however. Much of WebKit is used across the Mac/PC/iPhone releases of Safari, so all of these strings may just be inadvertent residue of parallel releases. Seeing as the file also refers to Spotlight, text-to-speech, and other features from OS X, this seems quite likely.

That said, it may well be an indication that Apple’s finally getting around to it. One can hope, right?