cb: Exporting R objects to clipboard

In mbojan/clipboard: Facilities to read/write to/from system clipboard

Exporting R objects to clipboard

Description

This function exports R objects into the system clipboard in a format that is easy to paste it into Office-like programs (MSWord etc.). Currently, methods for vectors, matrices, tables and data frames are implemented. For other objects the function tries to coerce its argument to a matrix first.

Usage

cb(object, ...)

## S3 method for class 'matrix'
cb(object, useNames = getOption("clipboard.useNames", TRUE),
  ...)

## S3 method for class 'data.frame'
cb(object, ...)

## S3 method for class 'table'
cb(object, ...)

## Default S3 method:
cb(object, ...)

Arguments

object	object to be processed
...	other arguments to/from other methods
useNames	logical, whether to use dimension names

Details

An object is converted to a tab-separated table first. Details of the conversion depend on the class, see below. Such converted object is written into the system clipboard. A message stating the size of the exported table is printed into the console. Content of the clipboard can then be pasted in to MS Word or MS Excel, or any other application.

For making tables in MSWord, LibreOffice, or alike you will have to first create an empty table with appropriate number of rows and columns. To aid you in this, when cb is called an informative message about the dimensionality of the exported table is printed. As a next step you have to select the whole table in MS Word, preferably via menus: Table|Select|Table. Then paste the content of the clipboard.

In MS Excel and alike you are not required to select the appropriate area of the spreadsheet. It is sufficient to put the cursor (cell selector) in the upper-left corner of the to-be-table.

If useNames is TRUE then the object is expanded to contain row and column names. The first cell in the first row contain dimension names (names(dimnames(object))) separated with a backslash.

Writing to clipboard is performed using write_cb.

If object is a matrix, the content is pasted into a single string in which columns are separated with tabs and rows with newline characters. Depending on the value of useNames row and column names are added as initial row and column to the result. If object's dimnames have names defined, they are put in the first cell of the first row.

If object is a data frame it is converted to a matrix processed as such. If the data frame contains factors, they are converted to chacracter strings first.

If object is a table it is converted to matrix. Tables with more than two dimensions are not supported. One-dimensional tables are exported horizontally.

For all other types of object's not covered above, cb tries to convert them to a matrix and process it as such.

Value

The converted object is put to clipboard and returned invisibly.

See Also

write_cb, section Clipboard of ?file, package xtable for exporting R objects to LaTeX or HTML.

mbojan/clipboard documentation built on June 27, 2022, 8:23 p.m.