io - How do I copy and paste data into R from the clipboard?

Question

I have my data open in another application (e.g. a spreadsheet, like Excel, or a text editor). If I copy that data to my operating system clipboard, how can I read it into R as a data.frame?

Answer 1

Assuming you have data in the Windows clipboard (for example, copied data from Excel), to put that data into a variable named copdat in R use:

copdat <- read.delim("clipboard")

If you want to copy data from an R variable named rdat into the Windows clipboard (for example, to copy into Excel) use:

write.table(rdat, "clipboard", sep="", row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)