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

Moderat picture Moderat · Nov 18, 2012 · Viewed 51k times · Source

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

bill_080 picture bill_080 · Nov 18, 2012

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="\t", row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)