[R] Read data.frame from clipboard

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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

> Helas, it is Windows (Vista). I thought Excel was already a hint, but I
> reckon that Excel can run on Mac Os as well ;)

It can, and I was writing that message on Mac OS X, where "clipboard" 
does not work.

> However, read.delim("clipboard") does the trick. Thanks a lot. I was not
> successful with read.DIF("clipboard") though. How to use that?

You need to send DIF to the clipboard.  I'm not an Excel user 
(although I do have it on this Mac), so I don't know how to do that -- 
but as the author of read.DIF mentions support for "clipboard", some 
programs presumably can.

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]
>> Sent: mardi 8 mars 2011 10:43
>> To: Thaler,Thorn,LAUSANNE,Applied Mathematics
>> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
>> Subject: Re: [R] Read data.frame from clipboard
>>
>> 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
>

-- 
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