How to paste text with special characters into Mathematica Online

Question

When using the desktop version of Mathematica, I can copy text from other applications (specifically, a block of data in a spreadsheet) and paste into Mathematica between " " and be asked if I want to escape special characters. This is a fast way of importing from Excel, as explained in this post.

That doesn't seem to work on Mathematica Online - escape characters aren't added. (In the case of importing data from a spreadsheet following the link above, the input of ImportString["","TSV"] adds multiplication symbols x between numbers, giving the appearance they will all be multiplied. However, when that cell is evaluated, the data is imported as a list of 1 list. This can easily be partitioned into a matrix, but the point is skip that extra step.)

Is there a way to get Mathematica Online to add escape characters?

Answer 1

One way is to paste it in anyway and fix it up later. For example. Define a function that takes the input string and then turns it into a matrix.

toMatrix[str_, cols_] := Partition[Interpreter[
   DelimitedSequence[Number]][StringReplace[str,
   "\t" -> ","]], cols];

Now, in your browser you type this into a cell

toMatrix[" ",2]

and paste into the " " and where you replace 2 with the number of columns. This may seem similar to what you already use, but maybe someone else has a better answer.