10.6 Clipboard

A handy way to grab data is to use the read_clipboard method, which takes the contents of the clipboard buffer and passes them to the read_table method. For instance, you can copy the following text to the clipboard (CTRL-C on many operating systems):

  A B C
x 1 4 p
y 2 5 q
z 3 6 r

And then import the data directly to a DataFrame by calling:

clipdf = pd.read_clipboard()

In [1]: clipdf
Out[1]: 
   A  B  C
x  1  4  p
y  2  5  q
z  3  6  r

The to_clipboard method can be used to write the contents of a DataFrame to the clipboard. Following which you can paste the clipboard contents into other applications (CTRL-V on many operating systems). Here we illustrate writing a DataFrame into clipboard and reading it back.

In [2]: df = pd.DataFrame(randn(5,3))

In [3]: df
Out[3]: 
        0       1       2
0  0.4691 -0.2829 -1.5091
1 -1.1356  1.2121 -0.1732
2  0.1192 -1.0442 -0.8618
3 -2.1046 -0.4949  1.0718
4  0.7216 -0.7068 -1.0396

In [4]: df.to_clipboard()

In [5]: pd.read_clipboard()
Out[5]: 
        0       1       2
0  0.4691 -0.2829 -1.5091
1 -1.1356  1.2121 -0.1732
2  0.1192 -1.0442 -0.8618
3 -2.1046 -0.4949  1.0718
4  0.7216 -0.7068 -1.0396

We can see that we got the same content back, which we had earlier written to the clipboard.