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.)

Install from CRAN

install.packages("clipr")

Or try the development version

devtools::install_github("mdlincoln/clipr")

library("clipr")
#> Welcome to clipr. See ?write_clip for advisories on writing to the clipboard in R.

cb <- read_clip()

clipr is pipe-friendly, and will default to returning the same object that was passed in.

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

To capture the string that clipr writes to the clipboard, specify return_new = TRUE. Character vectors with length > 1 will be collapsed with system-appropriate line breaks, unless otherwise specified

cb <- write_clip(c("Text", "for", "clipboard"), return_new = TRUE)
cb
#> [1] "Text\nfor\nclipboard"

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

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

tbl <- data.frame(a = c(1, 2, 3), b = c(4, 5, 6))
cb <- write_clip(tbl, return_new = TRUE)
cb
#> [1] "a\tb\n1\t4\n2\t5\n3\t6"

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

See the “Developing with clipr” vignette included with this package for advisories on writing code that calls clipr functions.

(a non-comprehensive list)

1. reprex by @jennybc takes R code on the clipboard and renders a reproducible example from it, ready to then paste on to GitHub, Stack Overflow, or the like.
2. datapasta by @milesmcbain eases the copying and pasting of R objects in and out of different sources (Excel, Google Sheets).

Matthew Lincoln