R devel - Sep 2005 - Wishlist - access non-text from clipboard in Windows

Just wanted to post this wishlist item.

Currently one can read text from the Windows clipboard but the Windows
clipboard can hold all sorts of objects, not just text, and it can
hold them simultaneously.  For example, if one selects some cells in
Excel and then copies them to the clipboard, the clipboard will have
all the cell boundary information but R can only read the text and
will have to figure it out if it can.

It would be nice if the user could use R to access all the information on
the clipboard, not just the text.

On 9/22/2005 11:13 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Just wanted to post this wishlist item.
> 
> Currently one can read text from the Windows clipboard but the Windows
> clipboard can hold all sorts of objects, not just text, and it can
> hold them simultaneously.  For example, if one selects some cells in
> Excel and then copies them to the clipboard, the clipboard will have
> all the cell boundary information but R can only read the text and
> will have to figure it out if it can.
> 
> It would be nice if the user could use R to access all the information on
> the clipboard, not just the text.
This looks like something someone should write a package to do.  It 
needs lots of support (e.g. what do all the possible clipboard format 
constants mean, what binary format corresponds to each, etc.), but it 
would only be useful on the Windows platform.

Duncan Murdoch

There is an open source clipboard extender CLCL that handles all
clipboard formats.  I think this code could be leveraged to simplify
it substantially.  Run CLCL and copy something from IE or Excel,
say, so that you have a complex object in the clipboard.
Now expand Clipboard in the left pane and the various components
in the clipboard are shown in the tree as children.  You can right click
and save any of them.

If this code could be followed it might be simple to just have a new
argument to clipboard() which specified which component to return
or one could optionally return a list of all of them.

On 9/22/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
wrote:
> On 9/22/2005 11:13 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > Just wanted to post this wishlist item.
> >
> > Currently one can read text from the Windows clipboard but the Windows
> > clipboard can hold all sorts of objects, not just text, and it can
> > hold them simultaneously.  For example, if one selects some cells in
> > Excel and then copies them to the clipboard, the clipboard will have
> > all the cell boundary information but R can only read the text and
> > will have to figure it out if it can.
> >
> > It would be nice if the user could use R to access all the information
on
> > the clipboard, not just the text.
>
> This looks like something someone should write a package to do.  It
> needs lots of support (e.g. what do all the possible clipboard format
> constants mean, what binary format corresponds to each, etc.), but it
> would only be useful on the Windows platform.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>