R - pipe(“pbcopy”) columns not lining up with pasting

Question

As a follow-up to a question I wrote a few days ago, I finally figured out how to copy to the clipboard to paste into other applications (read: Excel).

However, when using the function to copy and paste, the variable column headers are not lining up correctly when pasting.

Data (taken from a Flowing Data example I happened to be looking at):

data <- read.csv("http://datasets.flowingdata.com/post-data.txt")

Copy function:

write.table(file = pipe("pbcopy"), data, sep = "\t")

When loaded in, the data looks like this:

    id  views comments               category
1 5019 148896       28 Artistic Visualization
2 1416  81374       26          Visualization
3 1416  81374       26               Featured
4 3485  80819       37               Featured
5 3485  80819       37                Mapping
6 3485  80819       37           Data Sources

There is a row number without a column variable name (1, 2, 3, 4, ...)

Using the read.table(pipe("pbpaste")) function, it will load back into R fine.

However, when I paste it into Excel, or TextEdit, the column name for the second variable will be in the first variable column name slot, like this:

id  views   comments    category    
1   5019    148896      28          Artistic Visualization
2   1416    81374       26          Visualization
3   1416    81374       26          Featured
4   3485    80819       37          Featured
5   3485    80819       37          Mapping
6   3485    80819       37          Data Sources 

Which leaves the trailing column without a column name.

Is there a way to ensure the data copied to the clipboard is aligned and labeled correctly?

Answer 1

The row numbers do not have a column name in an R data.frame. They were not in the original dataset but they are put into the output to the clipboard unless you suppress it. The default for that option is set to TRUE but you can override it. If you want such a column as a named column, you need to make it. Try this when sending to excel.

df$rownums <- rownames(df)
edf <- df[ c( length(df), 1:(length(df)-1))]   # to get the rownums/rownames first
write.table(file = pipe("pbcopy"), edf, row.names=FALSE, sep = "\t")

Answer 2

You may just want to add the argument col.names=NA to your call to write.table(). It has the effect of adding an empty character string (a blank column name) to the header row for the first column.

write.table(file = pipe("pbcopy"), data, sep = "\t", col.names=NA)

To see the difference, compare these two function calls:

write.table(data[1:2,], sep="\t")
# "id"    "views" "comments"      "category"
# "1"     5019    148896  28      "Artistic Visualization"
# "2"     1416    81374   26      "Visualization"

write.table(data[1:2,], sep="\t", col.names=NA)
# ""      "id"    "views" "comments"      "category"
# "1"     5019    148896  28      "Artistic Visualization"
# "2"     1416    81374   26      "Visualization"