DATA MINING
Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams |
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Clipboard Data |
Suppose you are reviewing a small sample of data on the screen in any application (e.g., browsing a web site with some sample data). You want to load the data into R. This can be easily accomplished by selecting or highlighting the data with the mouse and telling R to read from the clipboard.
As an example, visit one of the UCI Machine Learning Repository
datasets, such as:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/databases/autos/imports-85.data. Highlight
the first few rows of the data and then run the following
read.table function with the file function
identifying the clipboard to be read from:
> autos <- read.csv(file("clipboard"), header=FALSE) > autos V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10 V11 V12 V13 V14 1 3 ? alfa-romero gas std two convertible rwd front 88.6 168.8 64.1 48.8 2548 2 3 ? alfa-romero gas std two convertible rwd front 88.6 168.8 64.1 48.8 2548 3 1 ? alfa-romero gas std two hatchback rwd front 94.5 171.2 65.5 52.4 2823 V15 V16 V17 V18 V19 V20 V21 V22 V23 V24 V25 V26 1 dohc four 130 mpfi 3.47 2.68 9 111 5000 21 27 13495 2 dohc four 130 mpfi 3.47 2.68 9 111 5000 21 27 16500 3 ohcv six 152 mpfi 2.68 3.47 9 154 5000 19 26 16500 |
You can also use scan, for example, to read data from the
clipboard into a vector or list:
> x <- scan("clipboard", what="") Read 7 items > x [1] "Age" "Gender" "Salary" "Home" "Vehicle" "Address" "Married" |
You can also write to the clipboard:
> write.table(ds, "clipboard", sep="\t", row.names=FALSE) |