From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Thu Sep 22 20:07:15 2005
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:07:15 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Wishlist - access non-text from clipboard in Windows
In-Reply-To: <971536df050922101246bf8667@mail.gmail.com>
References: <971536df05092208135b7ff57d@mail.gmail.com>	<4332DEEA.8090705@stats.uwo.ca>
	<971536df050922101246bf8667@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4332F2D3.6000807@stats.uwo.ca>

On 9/22/2005 1:12 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> There is an open source clipboard extender CLCL that handles all
> clipboard formats.  I think this code could be leveraged to simplify
> it substantially.  Run CLCL and copy something from IE or Excel,
> say, so that you have a complex object in the clipboard.
> Now expand Clipboard in the left pane and the various components
> in the clipboard are shown in the tree as children.  You can right click
> and save any of them.
> 
> If this code could be followed it might be simple to just have a new
> argument to clipboard() which specified which component to return
> or one could optionally return a list of all of them.

We'd need to write clipboard() first.  This might be a good idea, but 
it's not at the top of my priority list.

I think a better thing for R to do is to make sure it's easy for package 
writers to write connections.  Then a package writer could write 
clipboard(), and it would fit into the rest of the R machinery.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> On 9/22/05, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> On 9/22/2005 11:13 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> > Just wanted to post this wishlist item.
>> >
>> > Currently one can read text from the Windows clipboard but the Windows
>> > clipboard can hold all sorts of objects, not just text, and it can
>> > hold them simultaneously.  For example, if one selects some cells in
>> > Excel and then copies them to the clipboard, the clipboard will have
>> > all the cell boundary information but R can only read the text and
>> > will have to figure it out if it can.
>> >
>> > It would be nice if the user could use R to access all the information on
>> > the clipboard, not just the text.
>>
>> This looks like something someone should write a package to do.  It
>> needs lots of support (e.g. what do all the possible clipboard format
>> constants mean, what binary format corresponds to each, etc.), but it
>> would only be useful on the Windows platform.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
> 
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[Rd] Wishlist - access non-text from clipboard in Windows
Duncan Murdoch