Easy cut & paste from Excel to R?

Sorry to revive and old topic, but writing to the clipboard seems to
have a problem for me: column names are ignored. Example:

# ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
# write.clipboard
# ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
write.clipboard = function(obj) {
 write.table(obj, file("clipboard"), sep="\t", row.names=F,
 col.names=T)
}

a= matrix(1:4,2,2)
colnames(a) = c("a", "b")

write.clipboard(a)
a = as.data.frame(a)
write.clipboard(a)

both attempts will paste the date without column names.
Any idea why?

Thanks,
-Jose

On 2/16/05, Werner Wernersen <pensterfuzzer at yahoo.de> wrote:

Thank you all very much for the answers!
The read.table / read.delim2 commands are exactly what
I was looking for to get
a couple of numbers or a little matrix quickly into R
without creating an extra
text file every time.

And it works the other way around as well:
write.table(x, file("clipboard"), sep="\t")
Fantastic!

Thanks again,
   Werner

Nick Drew wrote:

I've had good luck with the scan() function when I
want to get a few numbers from Excel into R quickly

to

use it as a calculator. CAVEAT: you have to have the
numbers you want to copy in a column not a row in
Excel. For example:

In Excel your data are in a column as follows:
Col A
1
2
3

Then copy the 3 cells (e.g. 1, 2,3) in Excel and

open

R and type in:

data <- scan()

Then Paste using Ctrl-V. Hit the Enter key. You know
have an object called "data" that you can use and
manipulate in R.

I've taken this even further by creating an R

function

that will take a column of numbers from Excel and

then

scan() them into R, create a matrix, and then

perform

a Chi-square test. Let me know if you'd like to know
more. I'm a beginner and if I can do so can you!!

~Nick



		

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