pasting data

[Przemek Klosowski]

I often use octave for quick calculations.  For instance, I had some 
voltage/current data for a sensor, and wanted to see a plot and fit  a 
trendline (first and second order polynomials). I started by putting the 
data in a spreadsheet, but then I wanted to calculate some derived 
quantities and realized that  easier to work with the data in Octave.

The simplest and quickest way to cut data into Octave's commandline is 
to just assign it into an array: type 'a=[', then paste the table of 
data, and follow by a ']'. This works for most contexts, except when the 
column separator is a tab, as is the case when you're copying from a  
spreadsheet. I think tabs trigger readline's completion mechanism and at 
best do nothing and at worst could corrupt pasted data.

The tabs are even a problem when constructing a string while trying to 
use strread().

I know that I could save the data into a file outside of octave ("cat > 
/tmp/data", paste data and type Ctrl-D) and textread() it, but that's 
too much work :)

Is there a way to temporarily disable readline's TAB functionality, or 
bypass it in some clever way?