fread from "clipboard" or "clipboard-128" (on Windows) fails

Just noticed (say you "copy" delimited data from a text editor or from MSExcel and want to "paste" as data.table into an R workspace).

# this works
df <- read.delim("clipboard-128")

# this fails
dt <- fread("clipboard-128")
# Error in fread("clipboard-128") : 
#   Unable to open file after 5 attempts (error 3): C:\Users\mbacou\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUDARkO\file7643a2c3ff3
# In addition: Warning messages:
#1: running command 'C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /c (clipboard-128) > C:\Users\mbacou\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUDARkO\file7643a2c3ff3' had status 1 
#2: In shell(paste("(", input, ") > ", tt, sep = "")) :
#   '(clipboard-128) > C:\Users\mbacou\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpUDARkO\file7643a2c3ff3' execution # failed with error code 1

I'd recommend not doing this, for a few reasons:

it encourages non-reproducible code in projects
I suspect this is a very small use case ...
a trivial solution already exists - just copy into notepad, save as a file, then load it. In most cases, if the file is already in a text editor (or Excel) you can read directly from the file without copy/paste ...

I'm a fan of the 'just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should' motto

On MacOS it's as simple as fread("pbpaste ").
There are probably similar simple ways of accomplishing this on other platforms too.

Could someone on Windows try one of these solutions:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17819814/how-can-you-get-the-clipboard-contents-with-a-windows-command

The idea would be to try something like fread("paste ") [NB: the space is required for fread to treat it as a shell command]

Another possibility is that this issue is just #561 in disguise...

Or Get-Clipboard as mentioned in SO. This should be already shipped on recent windowses.

It's basically a switch between OS in fread.R:

Windows use readClipboard
MacOS use system(pbpaste)
Linus use either xclip or xsel

@ben-schwen

Hi everyone,

I was looking into this and it seems the Windows failure happens because fread() is trying to execute "clipboard-128" as a shell command, but Windows doesn't recognize it as a valid command.

From the discussion, it looks like this could be handled with a small OS-specific switch in fread.R, as @ben-schwen suggested.

For Windows, I see we could use the built-in readClipboard() function. But I also noticed in the StackOverflow thread that @MichaelChirico shared, there's another approach using PowerShell's Get-Clipboard command, which could work for modern Windows systems (Win10+). From what I have researched, Get-Clipboard handles different clipboard formats better than readClipboard() , though I'm not entirely sure about the format handling differences between the two.

If we go the PowerShell route, we could treat it as a system command with the trailing space (like how @st-pasha works on macOS).

What do you all think? I'd be happy to explore either direction or test both if that helps.

Fix fread clipboard handling on Windows (fixes Rdatatable#1292)

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fread from "clipboard" or "clipboard-128" (on Windows) fails #1292

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fread from "clipboard" or "clipboard-128" (on Windows) fails #1292

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kodonnell commented on Sep 6, 2017

st-pasha commented on Feb 5, 2018

MichaelChirico commented on May 31, 2020

jangorecki commented on May 31, 2020

ben-schwen commented on Oct 23, 2025

AmanKashyap0807 commented on Feb 8, 2026

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