Why do tabs disappear when pasted into the R console?

On Jun 3, 2013, at 15:22 , Sarah Goslee wrote:

Pasting tabs into the console works for me on linux, which suggests
that you need to provide more information about your OS and all the
other usual things.

Which console and which Linux?

Anyways, the thing that usually gets in the way is tab-completion. If you expect pasting to work exactly as if the same characters were typed at the keyboard, you can't really expect that TAB will not try to autocomplete commands and filenames. I don't know whether there's a way to temporarily disable completion.

-pf

Sarah

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:15 AM, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Dear R-help Members,

I have noticed that when pasting text with "tab" in it to the R console it
eliminates the tab. Whereas, when pasted into the R Editor, the tab is
preserved.
For example, pasting this:
"1997 7680"
In the R Console will result in:
"19977680"

Is there a way to preserve the tab?
This would allow (for example) to use read.table with a table copied from
website/libre-office/excel such as:

a = read.table( text=
"
1 2
3 4
")
a

I understand I can use readClipboard directly, but I wonder if there is a
way to use it while the text is kept in the R Editor.


With regards,
Tal

--
Sarah Goslee
http://www.functionaldiversity.org