[R] Why do tabs disappear when pasted into the R console?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 03/06/2013 14:48, peter dalgaard wrote:
>
> On Jun 3, 2013, at 15:22 , Sarah Goslee wrote:
>
>> Pasting tabs into the console works for me on linux, which suggests
>> that you need to provide more information about your OS and all the
>> other usual things.
>
> Which console and which Linux?
>
> Anyways, the thing that usually gets in the way is tab-completion. If you expect pasting to work exactly as if the same characters were typed at the keyboard, you can't really expect that TAB will not try to autocomplete commands and filenames. I don't know whether there's a way to temporarily disable completion.

There are lots of consoles and completion mechanisms.  But on RGui (at 
least this seems to be Windows), this is controlled by the environment 
variable R_COMPLETION and that can be set during a session.  Its help says

      ‘R_COMPLETION’: Optional.  If set to ‘FALSE’, command-line
           completion is not used.  (Not used by Mac OS GUI.)

and ??completion gets you there.


> -pf
>
>>
>> Sarah
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:15 AM, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hello Dear R-help Members,
>>>
>>> I have noticed that when pasting text with "tab" in it to the R console it
>>> eliminates the tab. Whereas, when pasted into the R Editor, the tab is
>>> preserved.
>>> For example, pasting this:
>>> "1997 7680"
>>> In the R Console will result in:
>>> "19977680"
>>>
>>> Is there a way to preserve the tab?
>>> This would allow (for example) to use read.table with a table copied from
>>> website/libre-office/excel such as:
>>>
>>> a = read.table( text=
>>> "
>>> 1 2
>>> 3 4
>>> ")
>>> a
>>>
>>> I understand I can use readClipboard directly, but I wonder if there is a
>>> way to use it while the text is kept in the R Editor.
>>>
>>>
>>> With regards,
>>> Tal
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sarah Goslee
>> http://www.functionaldiversity.org
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> 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