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

[Jose Quesada]

Sorry to revive and old topic, but writing to the clipboard seems to
have a problem for me: column names are ignored. Example:

# ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
# write.clipboard
# ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
write.clipboard = function(obj) {
	write.table(obj, file("clipboard"), sep="\t", row.names=F, col.names=T)
}

a= matrix(1:4,2,2)
colnames(a) = c("a", "b")

write.clipboard(a)
a = as.data.frame(a)
write.clipboard(a)

both attempts will paste the date without column names.
Any idea why?

Thanks,
-Jose

On 2/16/05, Werner Wernersen <pensterfuzzer at yahoo.de> wrote:
> Thank you all very much for the answers!
> The read.table / read.delim2 commands are exactly what
> I was looking for to get
> a couple of numbers or a little matrix quickly into R
> without creating an extra
> text file every time.
>
> And it works the other way around as well:
> write.table(x, file("clipboard"), sep="\t")
> Fantastic!
>
> Thanks again,
>    Werner
>
> Nick Drew wrote:
> > I've had good luck with the scan() function when I
> > want to get a few numbers from Excel into R quickly
> to
> > use it as a calculator. CAVEAT: you have to have the
> > numbers you want to copy in a column not a row in
> > Excel. For example:
> >
> > In Excel your data are in a column as follows:
> > Col A
> > 1
> > 2
> > 3
> >
> > Then copy the 3 cells (e.g. 1, 2,3) in Excel and
> open
> > R and type in:
> >
> >>data <- scan()
> >
> >
> > Then Paste using Ctrl-V. Hit the Enter key. You know
> > have an object called "data" that you can use and
> > manipulate in R.
> >
> > I've taken this even further by creating an R
> function
> > that will take a column of numbers from Excel and
> then
> > scan() them into R, create a matrix, and then
> perform
> > a Chi-square test. Let me know if you'd like to know
> > more. I'm a beginner and if I can do so can you!!
> >
> > ~Nick
> >
> >
> >
> > 		
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--
Jose Quesada, PhD.

j.quesada at warwick.ac.uk				ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow
http://lsa.colorado.edu/~quesadaj		Dept. of PSychology
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~jquesada		University of Warwick
office H114						Phone: +44 024 765 23 759
Coventry, UK