Copying a table into the clipboard

Question

Suppose we have a Python structure representing a table (whichever, eg 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, eg in Microsoft Word or Excel? I am looking preferably for a portable solution, otherwise specific solutions for MacOS, Linux and Windows would be appreciated.

Answer 1

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()