Write clipboard — write

Write a character vector to the system clipboard

Usage

write_clip(
  content,
  object_type = c("auto", "character", "table"),
  breaks = NULL,
  eos = NULL,
  return_new = FALSE,
  allow_non_interactive = Sys.getenv("CLIPR_ALLOW", interactive()),
  ...
)

Arguments

content: An object to be written to the system clipboard.
object_type: write_clip() tries to be smart about writing objects in a useful manner. If passed a data.frame or matrix, it will format it using write.table() for pasting into an external spreadsheet program. It will otherwise coerce the object to a character vector. auto will check the object type, otherwise table or character can be explicitly specified.
breaks: The separator to be used between each element of the character vector being written. NULL defaults to writing system-specific line breaks between each element of a character vector, or each row of a table.
eos: The terminator to be written after each string, followed by an ASCII nul. Defaults to no terminator character, indicated by NULL.
return_new: If true, returns the rendered string; if false, returns the original object
allow_non_interactive: By default, clipr will throw an error if run in a non-interactive session. Set the environment variable CLIPR_ALLOW=TRUE in order to override this behavior.
...: Custom options to be passed to write.table() (if x is a table-like). Defaults to sane line-break and tab standards based on the operating system. By default, this will use col.names = TRUE if the table object has column names, and row.names = TRUE if the object has row names other than c("1", "2", "3"...). Override these defaults by passing arguments here.

Value

Invisibly returns the original object

Note

On X11 systems, write_clip() will cause either xclip (preferred) or xsel to be called. Be aware that, by design, these processes will fork into the background. They will run until the next paste event, when they will then exit silently. (See the man pages for xclip and xsel for more on their behaviors.) However, this means that even if you terminate your R session after running write_clip(), those processes will continue until you access the clipboard via another program. This may be expected behavior for interactive use, but is generally undesirable for non-interactive use. For this reason you must not run write_clip() on CRAN, as the nature of xsel has caused issues in the past.

Call clipr_available() to safely check whether the clipboard is readable and writable.

Examples

if (FALSE) {
text <- "Write to clipboard"
write_clip(text)

multiline <- c("Write", "to", "clipboard")
write_clip(multiline)
# Write
# to
# clipboard

write_clip(multiline, breaks = ",")
# write,to,clipboard

tbl <- data.frame(a=c(1,2,3), b=c(4,5,6))
write_clip(tbl)
}