How can I copy and paste data into R? For example, you see a small data set on the web, perhaps in a blog or here on StackOverflow, and you want that data set in your R session. This is a common task for many of us, and there are several ways to go about. Below I present a solution based on this blog post that I have found useful.
First, copy (e.g. “⌘ + C”) the data set.
Then, paste (e.g. “⌘ + V”) to create an R character vector:
x <- " A B C D
1: 2 2 5 3
2: 2 1 2 3
3: 3 4 4 3"
Next, use the read.table() function:
y <- read.table(text = x, header = TRUE)
Done! The data is now in a data frame:
class(y)
[1] "data.frame"
