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

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Don MacQueen <macq at llnl.gov> writes:
>
>> I tried Ken's suggestion
>>     read.table(pipe("pbpaste"),header=TRUE)
>> on my Mac OS X system and it worked *without* generating any warning message.
>>
>> If my experience represents the norm, and Ken's is the exception, it
>> is so simple that no further contribution to R is needed, I would say.
>> Thank you, Ken.
>
> My conjecture is that it only happens when there are fewer than 5 data
> lines.
>
> We still need to sort out X11. Too bad that the xclip program isn't
> ubiquitous.

The read side in X11 is not too hard, and R-devel now has read from the 
primary selection via file("clipboard").  (I may change that name and 
allow reading from other selections later: I just made small changes to 
the Windows code.)

Xlib doesn't it seems really have a clipboard, and so it is much harder to 
act as the provider of the primary selection (you need to respond to X11 
events) -- xclip forks to do so.

BTW, xclip is at http://people.debian.org/~kims/xclip/ and seems no longer 
under active development (last change 18 months ago).

-- 
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