[R-SIG-Mac] Clipboard problems

[Duncan Murdoch]

The standard advice for reading the clipboard on OSX is to use the
pipe("pbpaste") connection, but I'm finding it misses the last line. (I
believe the last line in my examples generally doesn't include any EOL
marker.) For example, if I highlight these three lines:

line 1
line 2
line 3

and copy to the clipboard, then readLines(pipe("pbpaste")) gives

[1] "line 1" "line 2"

in R.app or R in a terminal. If I paste them here, I get

line 1
line 2
line 3

with the cursor left on the third line after the 3. In a console, echo
`pbpaste` gives

line 1 line 2 line 3

so the problem isn't (only) with pbpaste.

Duncan Murdoch

[Reijo Sund]

Post by Duncan Murdoch
The standard advice for reading the clipboard on OSX is to use the
pipe("pbpaste") connection, but I'm finding it misses the last line.

How about using tcltk?

if (require("tcltk")) strsplit(tclvalue(tcl("clipboard","get")),"\n")[[1]]

[peter dalgaard]

Post by Duncan Murdoch
The standard advice for reading the clipboard on OSX is to use the
pipe("pbpaste") connection, but I'm finding it misses the last line. (I
believe the last line in my examples generally doesn't include any EOL
line 1
line 2
line 3
and copy to the clipboard, then readLines(pipe("pbpaste")) gives
[1] "line 1" "line 2"
in R.app or R in a terminal. If I paste them here, I get
line 1
line 2
line 3
with the cursor left on the third line after the 3. In a console, echo
`pbpaste` gives
line 1 line 2 line 3
so the problem isn't (only) with pbpaste.

I think that the issue is that the last line is incomplete and pipe() is non-blocking

E.g.,

Peters-iMac:R-docs pd$ pbpaste
line 1
line 2
line 3Peters-iMac:R-docs pd$

and (with the same clipboard)

Post by Duncan Murdoch
readLines(pipe("pbpaste"))

[1] "line 1" "line 2"

pushes back the incomplete line, hoping that it might be available for a later read. (It takes someone smarter than me to say whether this is unavoidable or whether pipe() should be able to detect that the
command has completed.)

Post by Duncan Murdoch
readLines(textConnection(system("pbpaste",intern=TRUE)))

[1] "line 1" "line 2" "line 3"

-pd

Post by Duncan Murdoch
Duncan Murdoch
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[Hans-Jörg Bibiko]

Post by Duncan Murdoch
readLines(textConnection(system("pbpaste",intern=TRUE)))

[1] "line 1" "line 2" "line 3?

or the following should also work on each OSX

readLines(pipe("pbpaste|awk 1?))


Cheers,
Hans




******************************************************
Hans-Joerg Bibiko
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Linguistics
Deutscher Platz 6 phone: [phone]
D-04103 Leipzig fax: [phone]
Germany e-mail: bibiko [at] eva.mpg.de

[Adrian Dușa]

Post by peter dalgaard
[...]

Post by Duncan Murdoch
readLines(textConnection(system("pbpaste",intern=TRUE)))

[1] "line 1" "line 2" "line 3"
system("pbpaste",intern=TRUE)

[1] "line 1" "line 2" "line 3"