clipr

Simple utility functions to read and write from the system clipboards of Windows, OS X, and Unix-like systems (which require either xclip or xsel.)

Installation

Install from CRAN

install.packages("clipr")

Or try the development version

devtools::install_github("mdlincoln/clipr")

Usage

library("clipr")

cb <- read_clip()

# Character vectors with length > 1 will be collapsed with system-appropriate
# line breaks, unless otherwise specified

cb <- write_clip(c("Text", "for", "clipboard"))
cb
#> [1] "Text\nfor\nclipboard"     # on OS X or Unix-like
#> [1] "Text\r\nfor\r\nclipboard" # on Windows

cb <- write_clip(c("Text", "for", "clipboard"), breaks = ", ")
cb
#> [1] "Text, for, clipboard"

write_clip also tries to intelligently handle data.frames and matricies, rendering them with write.table so that they can be pasted into a spreasheet like Excel.

tbl <- data.frame(a=c(1,2,3), b=c(4,5,6))
cb <- write_clip(tbl)
cb
#> [1] "a\tb\n1\t4\n2\t5\n3\t6"   # on OS X or Unix-like
#> [1] "a,b\r\n1,4\r\n2,5\r\n3,6" # on Windows

read_clip_tbl will try to parse clipboard contents from spreadsheets into data frames directly.

Matthew Lincoln | University of Maryland, College Park