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

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Wed Mar 29 14:02:24 CEST 2006


On 3/28/2006 10:08 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Hi, I am just trying it now.  Suppose I copy the first few lines of
> the table at:
> 
> http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/2006/CumulativePL.php
> 
> into the clipboard by selecting them with the mouse in IE and
> pressing ctrl-C.  Now I can just go to Excel, click on a cell
> and press ctrl-V and they get pasted as cells.  In fact,
> that is usually what I would do: paste it into Excel and then
> transfer it to R.
> 
> Is this correct?

I don't use either IE or Excel, but that sounds plausible.
> 
> readClipboard(49340)  # got number from getClipboardFormats()
> 
> and then parse the HTML that I get from that.
> 
> I guess what would be nice would be if one could somehow use
> read.table to read it in and directly get a data frame out.

You'll have to write the code for that.  As far as I know, 49340 is not 
a standard clipboard format, so you'll need to look through the IE 
documentation to find out what's in it.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Regards.
> 
> 
> On 3/26/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> I've just committed some code to R-devel to allow clipboard access to
>> non-text in Windows.  This was something we discussed last September.
>> I'm not completely happy with the code (it works with numerical
>> clipboard format numbers rather than translating them into their names),
>> but I'd rather make it available than work on it any more.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>



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