[Rd] Wishlist - access non-text from clipboard in Windows

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 9/22/2005 2:50 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On 9/22/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> On 9/22/2005 1:12 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> > There is an open source clipboard extender CLCL that handles all
>> > clipboard formats.  I think this code could be leveraged to simplify
>> > it substantially.  Run CLCL and copy something from IE or Excel,
>> > say, so that you have a complex object in the clipboard.
>> > Now expand Clipboard in the left pane and the various components
>> > in the clipboard are shown in the tree as children.  You can right click
>> > and save any of them.
>> >
>> > If this code could be followed it might be simple to just have a new
>> > argument to clipboard() which specified which component to return
>> > or one could optionally return a list of all of them.
>>
>> We'd need to write clipboard() first.  This might be a good idea, but
>> it's not at the top of my priority list.
> 
> Sorry, its readClipboard() rather than clipboard().  See ?readClipboard

I don't think I ever noticed that function.  It looks tricky to 
determine how much data is there.  For text it goes to the first NULL 
character, but what do you do for other formats?  Can you see how the 
package you mentioned does it?

Duncan Murdoch
> 
>>
>> I think a better thing for R to do is to make sure it's easy for package
>> writers to write connections.  Then a package writer could write
>> clipboard(), and it would fit into the rest of the R machinery.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>> >
>> > On 9/22/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> >> On 9/22/2005 11:13 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> >> > Just wanted to post this wishlist item.
>> >> >
>> >> > Currently one can read text from the Windows clipboard but the Windows
>> >> > clipboard can hold all sorts of objects, not just text, and it can
>> >> > hold them simultaneously.  For example, if one selects some cells in
>> >> > Excel and then copies them to the clipboard, the clipboard will have
>> >> > all the cell boundary information but R can only read the text and
>> >> > will have to figure it out if it can.
>> >> >
>> >> > It would be nice if the user could use R to access all the information on
>> >> > the clipboard, not just the text.
>> >>
>> >> This looks like something someone should write a package to do.  It
>> >> needs lots of support (e.g. what do all the possible clipboard format
>> >> constants mean, what binary format corresponds to each, etc.), but it
>> >> would only be useful on the Windows platform.
>> >>
>> >> Duncan Murdoch
>> >>
>> >
>> > ______________________________________________
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>>
>>
> 
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