reading from clipboard error
Alan Kelly <AKELLY <at> tcd.ie> writes:
Hi Mark, I confirm your findings with readLines(). I expect this behaviour is due to the explicit intention of readLine() to:
"Read some or all text lines from a
connection" so the result is a character string. To import data via the clipboad from a text editor or from and Excel file I
use read.delim(pipe("pbpaste"))
rather than readLines() as I always intend that the copied material would
result in a data frame and not a
character string. I tried your example using read.delim() but added "header=F" as your example
did not have a variable name
(note R adds V1, V2, etc) - see below. Note that I do get a warning message
but the result still contains all 4
letters whether I include the trailing end or line character or not. Why not use read.delim() instead or readLines()? And if your Excel or text
file has variables names (as is
normal) just drop "header=F".
Best wishes,
Alan
# without trailing newline
t1=read.delim(pipe("pbpaste"), header=F)
Warning message:
In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote, :
incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'pbpaste'
# with trailing newline
t1
V1
1 A
2 B
3 C
4 D
# with trailing newline
t2=read.delim(pipe("pbpaste"), header=F)
t2
V1
1 A
2 B
3 C
4 D
Thanks for all the replies, and thanks Alan for finding the workaround!
For silent operation with.without the final EOL:
suppressWarnings(read.delim(pipe("pbpaste"), header=FALSE))
+ a bit of R-fu to convert 1D data.frame's into vector's when appropriate
cheers,
Mark