clipr

Simple utility functions to read and write from the system clipboards of Windows, OS X, and Unix-like systems (which require either xclip or xsel.)

Installation

Install from CRAN

install.packages("clipr")

Or try the development version

devtools::install_github("mdlincoln/clipr")

Usage

library("clipr")

cb <- read_clip()

# Character vectors with length > 1 will be collapsed with system-appropriate
# line breaks, unless otherwise specified

cb <- write_clip(c("Text", "for", "clipboard"))
cb
#> [1] "Text\nfor\nclipboard"     # on OS X or Unix-like
#> [1] "Text\r\nfor\r\nclipboard" # on Windows

cb <- write_clip(c("Text", "for", "clipboard"), breaks = ", ")
cb
#> [1] "Text, for, clipboard"

write_clip also tries to intelligently handle data.frames and matricies, rendering them with write.table so that they can be pasted into a spreasheet like Excel.

tbl <- data.frame(a=c(1,2,3), b=c(4,5,6))
cb <- write_clip(tbl)
cb
#> [1] "a\tb\n1\t4\n2\t5\n3\t6"   # on OS X or Unix-like
#> [1] "a,b\r\n1,4\r\n2,5\r\n3,6" # on Windows

read_clip_tbl will try to parse clipboard contents from spreadsheets into data frames directly.

Using clipr in packages

clipr's functionality, particularly on Linux-based systems, depends on the installation of additional software and, on headless systems like CRAN or other testing infrastructure like Travis, customization of environmental variables. Therfore, if you want to use clipr in your package, you will want to take some care in constructing your examples and tests:

1. Examples that will try to use read_clip() or write_clip() ought to be wrapped in \dontrun{}
2. Tests calling clipr should be conditionally skipped, calling on clipr_available() to check for this availability. This is necessary to pass CRAN checks.
3. If you are using Travis.ci to check your package build on Linux, consult the .travis.yml for this package, which includes code for setting the DISPLAY environment variable, installing xclip, and running a pre-build script that will set up xclip to run headlessly.

Matthew Lincoln