Add function to read DataFrame from clipboard across platforms

[wesm]

No description provided.

[takluyver]

There's code in IPython for cross-platform clipboard access - it's intended for text, but it could probably be adapted:

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/IPython/core/hooks.py
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/IPython/lib/clipboard.py

[wesm]

Thanks Thomas. I just copied that code into pandas.util.clipboard for now and added a new function read_clipboard which works nicely. Not sure how to test it but I guess I'll just make sure "it works" on all the platforms :)

[takluyver]

Great, thanks. It seems to be working on Linux, copying from LO Calc, in Python 2 and 3. Although it does choke on a non-ascii character in Python 2.

[wesm]

Ah, hm. If you figure out a patch to make it work let me know

[takluyver]

I think the trouble is that Python 2's CSV module doesn't handle unicode properly. There are some examples of wrappers in the csv library docs, if it's a serious concern.

It's also likely to be dependent on platform. The Linux clipboard code returns unicode, the Mac code looks like it will return a byte string, and I've no idea about the Windows code. For that matter, I suspect that the Mac code will fail on Python 3 - StringIO.StringIO gets translated to io.StringIO, which only allows unicode. io.BytesIO is the bytes counterpart, but I think the csv module in Python 3 expects unicode.

[fccoelho]

I am having some issues with row labels containing unicode characters. I am using pandas 0.8.1, python 2.7.3. Here is the error message I am getting:

---

UnicodeEncodeError Traceback (most recent call last)
in ()
----> 1 pd.read_clipboard(sep='\t')

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/parsers.pyc in read_clipboard(*_kwargs)
351 from pandas.util.clipboard import clipboard_get
352 text = clipboard_get()
--> 353 return read_table(StringIO(text), *_kwargs)
354
355 def to_clipboard(obj): # pragma: no cover

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/parsers.pyc in read_table(filepath_or_buffer, sep, dialect, header, index_col, names, skiprows, na_values, thousands, comment, parse_dates, keep_date_col, dayfirst, date_parser, nrows, iterator, chunksize, skip_footer, converters, verbose, delimiter, encoding, squeeze)
282 kwds['encoding'] = None
283
--> 284 return _read(TextParser, filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
285
286 @appender(_read_fwf_doc)

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/parsers.pyc in _read(cls, filepath_or_buffer, kwds)
182
183 # Create the parser.
--> 184 parser = cls(f, **kwds)
185
186 if nrows is not None:

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/parsers.pyc in init(self, f, delimiter, dialect, names, header, index_col, na_values, thousands, comment, parse_dates, keep_date_col, date_parser, dayfirst, chunksize, skiprows, skip_footer, converters, verbose, encoding, squeeze)
494 self._name_processed = False
495 if not self._has_complex_date_col:
--> 496 self.index_name = self._get_index_name()
497 self._name_processed = True
498 self._first_chunk = True

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/parsers.pyc in _get_index_name(self, columns)
671
672 try:
--> 673 next_line = self._next_line()
674 except StopIteration:
675 next_line = None

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pandas/io/parsers.pyc in _next_line(self)
604 self.pos += 1
605
--> 606 line = next(self.data)
607
608 line = self._check_comments([line])[0]

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe7' in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)