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.

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