[R] Read data.frame from clipboard

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You haven't told us your OS.  But assuming Windows, why not use

read.delim("clipboard")

or

read.DIF("clipboard")

?


On Tue, 8 Mar 2011, Thaler, Thorn, LAUSANNE, Applied Mathematics wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
>
>
> I find myself quite often in the situation that I want to copy data from
> Excel to R on the fly. If the source consists only of a single column, I
> usually do something like
>
>
>
> <copy column in Excel>
>
> x <- as.numeric(readClipboard())
>
>
>
> If I have a matrix, I usually export this matrix to a csv file first.
> This approach works fine. However, sometimes I want to do some quick
> checks and for these cases I don't like the file approach, as I do not
> want to clutter up my working directory with temporary  files.
>
>
>
> If you copy a matrix to the clipboard, you get a text file, separated by
> tabs (at least in my locale here). So I wrote this wrapper in order to
> alleviate copying btw Excel and R. Since I want to rely on the nifty R
> ability to transform text columns to factors while leaving numerical
> columns as they are, I first of all write the data to a file connection,
> from where I read using read.table.
>
>
>
> readClipboardDf <- function(token = "\t", ...) {
>
>  text <- readClipboard()
>
>  mat <- t(as.matrix(do.call(rbind, strsplit(text, token))))
>
>  fh <- file()
>
>  write(mat, fh, nrow(mat))
>
>  mat <- read.table(fh, ...)
>
>  close(fh)
>
>  mat
>
> }
>
>
>
> However, this approach uses a file connection as well, so it does not
> really change things (besides that it does things in one single step),
> so any comments appreciated of how I could do this Excel to R thing
> quickly preferably without any file transactions.
>
>
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
>
>
> BR Thorn
>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595