fread from "clipboard" or "clipboard-128" (on Windows) fails

[mbacou]

Just noticed (say you "copy" delimited data from a text editor or from MSExcel and want to "paste" as data.table into an R workspace).

# this works
df <- read.delim("clipboard-128")

# this fails
dt <- fread("clipboard-128")
# Error in fread("clipboard-128") : 
#   Unable to open file after 5 attempts (error 3): C:\Users\mbacou\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUDARkO\file7643a2c3ff3
# In addition: Warning messages:
#1: running command 'C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /c (clipboard-128) > C:\Users\mbacou\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUDARkO\file7643a2c3ff3' had status 1 
#2: In shell(paste("(", input, ") > ", tt, sep = "")) :
#   '(clipboard-128) > C:\Users\mbacou\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUDARkO\file7643a2c3ff3' execution # failed with error code 1

[kodonnell]

I'd recommend not doing this, for a few reasons:

1. it encourages non-reproducible code in projects
2. I suspect this is a very small use case ...
3. a trivial solution already exists - just copy into notepad, save as a file, then load it. In most cases, if the file is already in a text editor (or Excel) you can read directly from the file without copy/paste ...

I'm a fan of the 'just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should' motto

[st-pasha]

On MacOS it's as simple as fread("pbpaste ").
There are probably similar simple ways of accomplishing this on other platforms too.

[MichaelChirico]

Could someone on Windows try one of these solutions:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17819814/how-can-you-get-the-clipboard-contents-with-a-windows-command

The idea would be to try something like fread("paste ") [NB: the space is required for fread to treat it as a shell command]

Another possibility is that this issue is just #561 in disguise...

[jangorecki]

Or Get-Clipboard as mentioned in SO. This should be already shipped on recent windowses.

[ben-schwen]

It's basically a switch between OS in fread.R:

• Windows use readClipboard
• MacOS use system(pbpaste)
• Linus use either xclip or xsel

[AmanKashyap0807]

Hi everyone,

I was looking into this and it seems the Windows failure happens because fread() is trying to execute "clipboard-128" as a shell command, but Windows doesn't recognize it as a valid command.

From the discussion, it looks like this could be handled with a small OS-specific switch in fread.R, as @ben-schwen suggested.

For Windows, I see we could use the built-in readClipboard() function. But I also noticed in the StackOverflow thread that @MichaelChirico shared, there's another approach using PowerShell's Get-Clipboard command, which could work for modern Windows systems (Win10+). From what I have researched, Get-Clipboard handles different clipboard formats better than readClipboard() , though I'm not entirely sure about the format handling differences between the two.

If we go the PowerShell route, we could treat it as a system command with the trailing space (like how @st-pasha works on macOS).

What do you all think? I'd be happy to explore either direction or test both if that helps.