data cut-and-paste on Octave commandline

[Przemek Klosowski]

Often I'd like to process some tabular data from other apps (browser or 
spreadsheet). It's easy enough to mark the entire table, but the 
multiple numbers on each row often seem to be delimited by tabs. When 
this is dropped into Octave command line after the opening stanza of the 
form 'myvar=[' , the tabs are eaten by readline, and the individual 
numbers run together.

With spreadsheet, I usually can cut and paste individual columns 
one-by-one, but this doesn't work for tabular data from other sources.

Is there  a better way to feed data to Octave?

If not, is there a way to temporarily turn off/disable readline processing?