ENH: to_clipboard(as="html" | "markdown" | "latex" | ...)

[janosh]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

When writing papers, it's often useful to be able to copy dataframes into documents as Markdown, HTML or LaTeX.

Describe the solution you'd like

Allow more formats besides excel: bool in DataFrame.to_clipboard(). For example, a new keyword as:

df.to_clipboard(as="html" | "markdown" | "latex" | ...)

API breaking implications

Pure extension unless excel keyword of to_clipboard() was removed in favor of as.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The other option would be allowing the buf argument of df.to_(html|markdown|latex|...) to take the string "clipboard":

df.to_markdown(buf="clipboard")

[jreback]

all of these exist already as methods

why should .to_clipboard support this?

[janosh]

Like I said, to copy dataframes into text documents...

all of these exist already as methods

They don't chain, right? How do I get df.to_html() into the clipboard?

[jreback]

what does that even mean?

[wany-oh]

It seems that clipboard_set() can be used.

import pandas as pd
from pandas.io.clipboard import clipboard_set

df = pd._testing.makeMixedDataFrame()

clipboard_set(df.to_html())
clipboard_set(df.to_latex())
clipboard_set(df.to_markdown())
...
clipboard_set(str(df))  # It can copy anything of type str

[janosh]

@wany-oh Thanks, that works great!

what does that even mean?

@jreback Which part is unclear?

[attack68]

clipboard_set is used within DataFrame.to_clipboard.

I would hazard that to_clipboard might have been coded before the other formats, html, laTex etc became available. It seems to be a simple extension to change excel={True, False} to something like format={"excel", "str", "html", "latex"} and to call the relevant renderer.