R help - Mar 2000 - Requery: R 1.0.0 for Win95 and clipboard

Noone answered so I guess this is not possible, but can anyone definitely put
me out of my misery...

'I have just begun using R 1.0.0 for Win95. Can someone please tell me  how
to
put a data frame on the clipboard, and how to read data into a  data frame
from the clipboard.'

Is this something that's planned? The clipboard seems pretty fundamental to
Windows (and other OS?).

Thanks
Ursula Kellett
Brisbane Australia

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Ursula Kellett <u.kellett at qut.edu.au> writes:
> Noone answered so I guess this is not possible, but can anyone definitely
put
> me out of my misery...
> 
> 'I have just begun using R 1.0.0 for Win95. Can someone please tell me 
how to
> put a data frame on the clipboard, and how to read data into a  data frame
> from the clipboard.'
> 
> Is this something that's planned? The clipboard seems pretty
fundamental to
> Windows (and other OS?).
The short answer is "no", but most people in the developer crowd come
from a Unix background, so there may be some useful techniques we just
don't know about. Some work has been done on communication with Excel
and using (D)COM.

Counterquestion: How would you expect it to work? What would you do
with it once it was on the clipboard and how would you ensure that
data contained the relevant information (factor levels, e.g.) when
read from the clipboard? What are the relevant communication channels?

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
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Hi Ursula,

I don?t use Windows anymore, but I?think it isn?t possible. But maybe
this helps you:

To paste a dataframe to the Win-clipboard, just print the dataframe in R
(asume its name as my_data)
> my_data
Now you can mark it with your mouse, type Contr+C to paste it to the
clippboard. To read data from the clippboard, you must save it to a
file, e.g. use the Notepad editor and paste the data to its sheet. Save
the file and use the read.table-function in R to read the data from the 
file.

bye, Sven

Ursula Kellett wrote:
> 
> Noone answered so I guess this is not possible, but can anyone definitely
put
> me out of my misery...
> 
> 'I have just begun using R 1.0.0 for Win95. Can someone please tell me 
how to
> put a data frame on the clipboard, and how to read data into a  data frame
> from the clipboard.'
> 
> Is this something that's planned? The clipboard seems pretty
fundamental to
> Windows (and other OS?).
> 
> Thanks
> Ursula Kellett
> Brisbane Australia
> 
>
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On Thu, Mar 23, 2000 at 03:22:39PM +1000, Ursula Kellett
wrote:
> Noone answered so I guess this is not possible, but can anyone definitely
put
> me out of my misery...
> 
> 'I have just begun using R 1.0.0 for Win95. Can someone please tell me 
how to
> put a data frame on the clipboard, and how to read data into a  data frame
> from the clipboard.'
  Only thing I now it is possible is to use 'scan'+paste.
  E.g., if the clipboard contains
  1 2 3
  4 5 6
  and if, in the RGui console, you type something like
  > x<-scan()
  1:
  then pasting the content of the clipboard (using, Ctrl-Y or the
  Edit|Paste menuitem or the Paste menu available with the mouse
  right button) and hitting <return>, let you to get the clipboard
  content in x,i.e.,
  > x
  [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 
  Then, you have to transform x in a data frame, e.g., using something like
  > data.frame(matrix(x,2,3,byrow=T))
    X1 X2 X3
  1  1  2  3
  2  4  5  6

> Is this something that's planned? The clipboard seems pretty
fundamental to
> Windows (and other OS?).
> 
  What kind of functionality are you thinking about? Something like
  having 'read.table.from.clipboard' or something more advanced?

  guido
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The usual way of copying 2-dimensional arrays to and from the clipboard is to
separate columns by <Tab> character, and to separate lines by
<Newline>
character (CR-LF under DOS/Windows).

Potential problems (at least the three I can see immediately): dimnames, factors
and NAs.

I would suggest that including dimnames should be optional.

I would assume that factors should be copied as.character(...) TO clipboard.
When pasting FROM the clipboard, it would be nice to have an option for leaving
the character vectors as text or transforming them into factors. (I often have
to do a lot of gymnastics to transform factors into character vectors in
dataframes with S+, and I really don't like it).

The NAs could be represented by empty cell, i.e. <Tab><Tab>, for
both copy and
paste.

In S-PLUS 2000, one can copy and paste data from the data editor, but it seems
that the dimnames don't get copied.

In fact, I think that the clipboard operations should work like read.table and
write.table, except  that under R , 'file="clipboard" '
apparently uses an
internal clipboard, and not the standard Windows clipboard.

With S-PLUS 2000, if you say

     write.table(x,file="clipboard",sep="\t")

you can paste the data into Excel.

You can also read data from Excel by

     read.table(file="clipboard",header=T,sep="\t")


Best regards

Zivan


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