Reading from a clipboard

This is a rather interesting feature in pandas. Any tabular data that has been copied onto the clipboard can be read as a DataFrame in pandas.

Let's copy the following tabular data with the usual ctrl + C keyboard command:

	Gender	Entry_Date	Flag
A	M	2012-01-19	True
B	F	2012-12-30	False
C	M	2012-05-05	False

Calling the read_clipboard() function makes this data available as a pandas DataFrame:

pd.read_clipboard()

Take a look at the following output:

Output of read_clipboard

This function also recognizes the Flag column as a bool data type by default and assigns the unnamed column to be the index:

Data types after reading the clipboard