R: Read/Write to/from the Clipboard in MS Windows

clipboard {utils}

R Documentation

Read/Write to/from the Clipboard in MS Windows

Description

Transfer text between a character vector and the Windows clipboard in MS Windows (only).

Usage

getClipboardFormats(numeric = FALSE)
readClipboard(format = 13, raw = FALSE)
writeClipboard(str, format = 13)

Arguments

numeric

logical: should the result be in human-readable form (the default) or raw numbers?

format

an integer giving the desired format.

raw

should the value be returned as a raw vector rather than as a character vector?

str

a character vector or a raw vector.

Details

The Windows clipboard offers data in a number of formats: see e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/desktop/dataxchg/clipboard-formats.

The standard formats include

CF_TEXT	1	Text in the machine's locale
CF_BITMAP	2
CF_METAFILEPICT	3	Metafile picture
CF_SYLK	4	Symbolic link
CF_DIF	5	Data Interchange Format
CF_TIFF	6	Tagged-Image File Format
CF_OEMTEXT	7	Text in the OEM codepage
CF_DIB	8	Device-Independent Bitmap
CF_PALETTE	9
CF_PENDATA	10
CF_RIFF	11	Audio data
CF_WAVE	12	Audio data
CF_UNICODETEXT	13	Text in Unicode (UCS-2)
CF_ENHMETAFILE	14	Enhanced metafile
CF_HDROP	15	Drag-and-drop data
CF_LOCALE	16	Locale for the text on the clipboard
CF_MAX	17	Shell-oriented formats

Applications normally make data available in one or more of these and possibly additional private formats. Use raw = TRUE to read binary formats, raw = FALSE (the default) for text formats. The current codepage is used to convert text to Unicode text, and information on that is contained in the CF_LOCALE format. (Take care if you are running R in a different locale from Windows. It is recommended to read as Unicode text, so that Windows does the conversion based on CF_LOCALE, if available.)

The writeClipboard function will write a character vector as text or Unicode text with standard CRLF line terminators. It will copy a raw vector directly to the clipboard without any changes. It is recommended to use Unicode text (the default) instead of text to avoid interoperability problems. (Note that R 4.2 and newer on recent systems uses UTF-8 as the native encoding but the machine's locale uses a different encoding.)

Value

For getClipboardFormats, a character or integer vector of available formats, in numeric order. If non human-readable character representation is known, the number is returned.

For readClipboard, a character vector by default, a raw vector if raw is TRUE, or NULL, if the format is unavailable.

For writeClipboard an invisible logical indicating success or failure.

Note

This is only available on Windows.