Code to import data from a Stack overflow query into R

Question

When I try to answer a question in Stack Overflow about R, a good part of my time is spent trying to rebuild the data given as example (unless the question author has been nice enough to provide them as R code). So my question is, if somebody just asks a question and gives his sample data frame the following way : ``` a b c 1 11 foo 2 12 bar 3 13 baz 4 14 bar 5 15 foo ``` Do you have a tip or a function to import this easily into an R session, without having to type the entire `data.frame()` instruction ? Thanks in advance for any hint ! PS : sorry if the term "query" is not really nice in my question title, but it seems you can't use the word "question" in a question title in Stack overflow :-)

Accepted Answer

Maybe `textConnection()` is what you want here:

```
R> zz <- read.table(textConnection("a  b   c
1 11 foo
2 12 bar
3 13 baz
4 14 bar
5 15 foo"), header=TRUE)
R> zz
  a  b   c
1 1 11 foo
2 2 12 bar
3 3 13 baz
4 4 14 bar
5 5 15 foo
R> 
```

It allows you to treat the text as a "connection" from which to read. You can also just copy and paste, but access from the clipboard is more dependent on the operating system and hence less portable.

Code to import data from a Stack overflow query into R

Solution

Problem