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

[Uwe Ligges]

Ken Knoblauch wrote:

> 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=",")
>>>

Connections to the clipboard are only available on Windows.

Uwe Ligges


> 
> 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   
> 
> ____________________
> Ken Knoblauch
> Inserm U 371
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