R will produce an error message if the copied column contained a string. Note that scan only works with columns of numbers. Then x will contain the numbers from Excel as numbers, not as quoted strings. Copy the column from Excel, run x <- scan(), type Ctrl-v to paste into R, and press enter to signal the end of input to scan. You can use the scan function to copy a column of numbers from Excel to R. If you select a block of numbers from Excel, each row becomes a single string containing tabs where there were originally cell boundaries. The elements will be character strings, even if the clipboard contained a column of numbers before the readClipboard command was executed. Will assign the contents of the clipboard to the vector x. The companion function for writeClipboard is readClipboard. After a vector has been copied to the clipboard, the elements of the vector will be separated by newlines when pasted into a document. If one element of a vector is a character string, all elements will be cast to strings without the need for an explicit as.character statement.

The solution is to call writeClipboard( as.character(x) ), casting the object x to a character string.Īll variables in R are vectors, and elements of a vector can have differing types.

Produces the error message Error in writeClipboard(str, format) :Īrgument must be a character vector or a raw vector For example the code > x writeClipboard(x)Ĭopies the string “hello world” to the clipboard as expected.

However, the argument to writeClipboard may need to be cast to a character type. R has a function writeClipboard that does what the name implies. These notes explain how to move data between R and Excel and other Windows applications via the clipboard.

How to paste list into excel cells