How to solve "clipboard buffer is full and output lost" error in R running in Windows?

Question

I am trying to copy some data directly from R to the clipboard, in my Windows machine. I found in some sites that using file="clipboard" would work. And it does, but for very small datasets.

For example:

If I copy a small dataset (100 obs), it works smoothly.

df1 <- data.frame(x=runif(100)) write.table(df1, file="clipboard", sep="\t", col.names=NA) 

But if I increase the observations to 10,000, it fails:

df1 <- data.frame(x=runif(10000)) write.table(df1, file="clipboard", sep="\t", col.names=NA) 

The error is:

Warning message: In .External2(C_writetable, x, file, nrow(x), p, r

Any workaround to this?

Answer 1

If you type ?connections you will find your answer.

This is the relevant part:

"When writing to the clipboard, the output is copied to the clipboard only when the connection is closed or flushed. There is a 32Kb limit on the text to be written to the clipboard. This can be raised by using e.g. file("clipboard-128") to give 128Kb."

So, the solution is pretty straigthforward:

df1 <- data.frame(x=runif(10000)) write.table(df1, file="clipboard-16384", sep="\t", col.names=NA) 

Note that the number of Kb is just an example, so you can change it as you need (I put 2^14 that should be more than enough for your data set, but you can increase it even more. Not sure which is the hard limit, though. Maybe physical memory?)