R devel - Nov 2003 - accessing windows clipboard from load and save (PR#4999)

Full_Name: Gabor Grothendieck
Version: 1.7.1
OS: Windows 2000
Submission from: (NULL) (207.35.143.81)



   save(x,ascii=TRUE,file("clipboard")) 

works but 

   load(file("clipboard")) 

does not.

Even better would be if

   save(x,ascii=TRUE,"clipboard") 
and 
   load("clipboard")

worked as that would provide consistency with read.table("clipboard")

On Sat,  8 Nov 2003 15:21:48 +0100 (CET), you wrote:
>Full_Name: Gabor Grothendieck
>Version: 1.7.1
>OS: Windows 2000
>Submission from: (NULL) (207.35.143.81)
>
>
>
>   save(x,ascii=TRUE,file("clipboard")) 
>
>works but 
>
>   load(file("clipboard")) 
>
>does not.
This is a documented limitation of the clipboard connection (which is
write-only), not a bug.  Yes, it would be nice if all clipboard
functions were supported, but they're not.  
>Even better would be if
>
>   save(x,ascii=TRUE,"clipboard") 
>and 
>   load("clipboard")
>
>worked as that would provide consistency with
read.table("clipboard")
Is this documented somewhere?  I didn't know about it (but it does
work).

Personally, I'd rather have a connection created by a function named
clipboard(); it looks kludgy to interpret some filenames as magic
values.  Then your examples would be

save(x,ascii=TRUE,file=clipboard('w')) 

load(clipboard())

read.table(clipboard())

Another special connection (which might exist? I couldn't spot it)
would be one that read from a character vector, i.e.
c('a','b','c')
would be read as 3 lines of one letter each.  Then something like

 stringConnection(readClipboard()) 

would be one way to implement clipboard().

Duncan Murdoch

Yet another report of a non-bug!

First, your example of the use of save() does not work.  That *is* a bug.

Second, please RTFM.  help(load) says

     'load' can load R objects saved in the current or any earlier
     format.  It can read a compressed file (see 'save') directly from
     a file or from a suitable connection.
                      ^^^^^^^^
and nothing says a clipboard is a suitable connection.

If you really want to make a positive contribution you could work out what
changes are necessary to make a clipboard a suitable connection and supply
a patch against the current sources (not an obselete version of R). Hints:
load expects to be able to open a connection in binary mode, and to wrap
it in a decompression wrapper.


On Sat, 8 Nov 2003 ggrothendieck@myway.com wrote:
> Full_Name: Gabor Grothendieck
> Version: 1.7.1
> OS: Windows 2000
> Submission from: (NULL) (207.35.143.81)
> 
> 
> 
>    save(x,ascii=TRUE,file("clipboard")) 
> 
> works but 
> 
>    load(file("clipboard")) 
> 
> does not.
> 
> Even better would be if
> 
>    save(x,ascii=TRUE,"clipboard") 
> and 
>    load("clipboard")
> 
> worked as that would provide consistency with
read.table("clipboard")
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
> 
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@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

The bug list is the only place to record and track suggestions.
I don't think it matters whether its a bug in the strict sense
of the word.  The clipboard should work consistently and orthogonally
across R.

Perhaps there could be a categorization of issues submitted to
the bug list to properly identify which are bugs in the narrow
sense, which are inconsistencies, which are feature enhancement
suggestions, etc.

 --- On Sat 11/08, Prof Brian Ripley < ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk > wrote:

Yet another report of a non-bug!

I agree that that would be a cleaner solution.

 --- On Sat 11/08, Duncan Murdoch < dmurdoch@pair.com > wrote:
Personally, I'd rather have a connection created by a function named
clipboard(); it looks kludgy to interpret some filenames as magic
values.

Regarding, loading a file from the clipboard, I had also posted 
a workaround:

   load(pipe("pclip"))

where pclip is from unxutils.sourceforge.net, although yours has
the advantage of not requiring external programs.

 --- On Sat 11/08, Prof Brian Ripley < ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk > wrote:

zz <- file("clipboard", "r")
readLines(zz, 1)
.Internal(loadFromConn(zz, .GlobalEnv))
close(zz)