DATA MINING Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home List of Figures List of Tables Data Mining Introduction Data Mining with Rattle Data Exploring Data Transforming Data Cluster Analysis Association Analysis Classification and Regression Models Evaluation and Deployment Issues Moving into R Troubleshooting Beyond Rattle R Data Graphics in R Understanding Data Preparing Data Descriptive and Predictive Analytics Issues Evaluating Models Reporting Cluster Analysis Text Mining Text Mining Algorithms Bagging Bayes Classifier Cluster Analysis Conditional Trees Hierarchical Clustering K-Nearest Neighbours Linear Models Neural Networks Support Vector Machines Open Products AlphaMiner Borgelt Data Mining Suite KNime R Rattle Weka Closed Products C4.5 Clementine Equbits Foresight GhostMiner InductionEngine ODM Enterprise Miner Statistica Data Miner TreeNet Virtual Predict Appendicies Installing GTK, R, and Rattle Glossary Bibliography Index

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 XnullXXnullXR functionsR functions (R function)R functionsR libraries (R library)R functionsR option (R option)R functionsR packages (R package)R functionsDatasets (Dataset)XnullXR functionsR functionsread.table function with the XnullXR functionsR functions (R function)R functionsR libraries (R library)R functionsR option (R option)R functionsR packages (R package)R functionsDatasets (Dataset)R functionsR functionsfile 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"

To try this out yourself, select the list of strings and run the XnullXR functionsR functions (R function)R functionsR libraries (R library)R functionsR option (R option)R functionsR packages (R package)R functionsDatasets (Dataset)R functionsR functionsscan function.

You can also write to the clipboard:

> write.table(ds, "clipboard", sep="\t", row.names=FALSE)

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