Wishlist - access non-text from clipboard in Windows

On 9/22/2005 2:50 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

On 9/22/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

On 9/22/2005 1:12 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

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.

We'd need to write clipboard() first.  This might be a good idea, but
it's not at the top of my priority list.

Sorry, its readClipboard() rather than clipboard().  See ?readClipboard

I don't think I ever noticed that function.  It looks tricky to
determine how much data is there.  For text it goes to the first NULL
character, but what do you do for other formats?  Can you see how the
package you mentioned does it?

Duncan Murdoch

I think a better thing for R to do is to make sure it's easy for package
writers to write connections.  Then a package writer could write
clipboard(), and it would fit into the rest of the R machinery.

Duncan Murdoch

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