[R] Easy cut & paste from Excel to R?

[Ken Knoblauch]

Hi,

I tried the interesting suggestion below, discussed in several postings 
yesterday on the help-list, on my Mac (0S 10.3.7) but could not get it to
work, as shown in the tests indicated below.

>>
>>   read.table(file("clipboard"), sep="\t", dec=",")
>>

If it is obvious (even, if not), can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?  
Do I need to perform an additional operation to open "clipboard", or is this 
option not available on Mac? I did not find any special discussion of this in
the FAQ nor searching under "clipboard" in the archives.  Thank you, in 
advance, for any enlightenment.

data.frame(matrix(rnorm(12),ncol=3))
          X1          X2          X3
1  0.4276964 -0.49584891  0.02150469
2 -0.8323586 -0.40120649 -1.90733346
3 -0.8954563 -1.33195844 -1.28261484
4  0.4772382 -0.03703087  0.46719156
#At this point, I block-marked the printed output and apple-C'd it into the 
clipboard.
#I then checked the clipboard to verify that the data was indeed copied there.
> read.table("clipboard")
Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open file `clipboard' 
> read.table(file("clipboard"))
Error in open.connection(file, "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open file `clipboard' 
> read.table(file("clipboard","r"))
Error in file("clipboard", "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open file `clipboard' 
> read.table(file("clipboard","r"),header=TRUE)
Error in file("clipboard", "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open file `clipboard' 
>read.delim(file("clipboard","r"),header=TRUE)
Error in file("clipboard", "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open file `clipboard' 

> file("clipboard")
description       class        mode        text      opened    can read 
"clipboard"      "file"         "r"      "text"    "closed"       "yes" 
  can write 
      "yes" 

> file("clipboard","r")
Error in file("clipboard", "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message: 
cannot open file `clipboard' 

platform powerpc-apple-darwin6.8
arch     powerpc                
os       darwin6.8              
system   powerpc, darwin6.8     
status                          
major    2                      
minor    0.1                    
year     2004                   
month    11                     
day      15                     
language R   

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Ken Knoblauch
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