Copying a table into the clipboard

Question

Suppose we have a Python structure representing a table (whichever, e.g. a list of lists).

Is there an elegant way to programmatically copy that structure into the clipboard, so that it can be correctly pasted as a table, e.g. in Microsoft Word or Excel? I am looking preferably for a portable solution, otherwise specific solutions for MacOS, Linux and Windows would be appreciated.

Just a guess, but on a Mac, I imagine you could start `pbcopy` in a subprocess and pipe your data to it... — Mark Setchell, Oct 08 '19 at 19:07
Thanks a lot! The question is more focused on how you copy -- specifically -- a table into the clipboard, rather that any string. — fralau, Oct 10 '19 at 07:15

Jonathan Feenstra · Answer 1 · 2019-10-09T09:08:35.033

To copy a table in the form of a list of lists to the clipboard, first convert it to a string by concatenating values with tabs and rows with new lines:

table = [
            list(range(10)),
            list(range(11, 21)),
            list(range(21, 31)),
]

result = '\n'.join(['\t'.join(map(str, row)) for row in table])

print(result)

This results in:

0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20
21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30

There are several ways to copy this to the clipboard. Here is a cross-platform method using tkinter based on this answer:

from tkinter import Tk

r = Tk()
r.withdraw()
r.clipboard_clear()
r.clipboard_append(result)
r.update()
r.destroy()

Thanks for the clear answer! That's pretty straightforward. – fralau Oct 10 '19 at 07:13 — fralau, Oct 10 '19 at 07:13

Copying a table into the clipboard

1 Answers1