Support writing UTF-8 output in Windows
On 13-11-10 7:31 AM, Sverre Stausland wrote:
My e-mail was intended as a typical "feature request", and I couldn't find any more suitable place for that than the r-devel mailing list. I am not a programmer, so I don't have the skills to write this into R's source code myself. The incentive is nevertheless clear enough. I believe a software program in 2013 which imports, manipulates, and exports text in various formats (text files, picture files, postscript files, etc.) would normally be expected to support UTF-8. It might not be trivial to implement as R is written now, but the expectation will still be there. So I still believe it would be a good idea if R soon would be able to support UTF-8.
R does support UTF-8. It all works smoothly in a UTF-8 locale, not so smoothly if you have your computer set up to use a different 8 bit encoding.
I'm not quite able to piece together from the information you gave what the underlying issues are. What I read is: (1) Some R functions convert characters to the native encoding. (2) Windows did not support UTF-8 when R was first written. (3) Unix did not support UCS-2 when R was first written. I'm guessing here that the implications are: (1) R's write.table() converts characters to a native encoding. (2) The native encoding in Windows 7 is not UTF-8. (3) The native encoding in Unix systems is UTF-8.
You got it right for the first 4. Regarding (2) in your second list, that's right, and in fact UTF-8 is not supported as a native encoding. And point (3) is optional, though UTF-8 is the dominant encoding nowadays. The easiest solution is for you to switch to a Unix variant and set it up to use UTF-8 as the native encoding. Next easiest would be for Microsoft to add UTF-8 as a code page. Most difficult would be for R to handle UTF-8 properly on systems with limited support for it. We probably will add small changes that let you work around the Windows problems, but they won't be very satisfactory to anyone. I don't think we will make the big changes that would make R look like "a software program in 2013", since it would be so much work, and there's such an easy workaround. Duncan Murdoch
But this is just guesswork.
PS. A related issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19881553/using-unicode-inside-rs-expression-command Sverre