Support writing UTF-8 output in Windows
To continue this discussion with constructive propositions, here is a page that provides useful tracks for using UTF-8 on Windows: http://www.utf8everywhere.org (second half of the page).
On 10 Nov 2013, at 00:58, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:
Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan <at> gmail.com> writes:
On 13-11-09 12:07 PM, Sverre Stausland wrote:
As recently discussed on Stack Overflow, R for Mac OS and Ubuntu (so probably all Unix systems) can correctly write files with UTF-8 encoding, but R for Windows cannot:
That's not an accurate description of the problem. Some functions in R convert values to the native encoding, but not all do.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r I strongly suggest that R for Windows should support this feature in upcoming versions.
It's not trivial to do. When R was written, and perhaps still on some obscure platforms, there wasn't any way to do that--Windows didn't support UTF-8 then, just Microsoft's version of UCS-2 and a variety of other more limited encodings. Unix platforms didn't support UCS-2. So internally R keeps many things in the native encoding. If you decide to rewrite R from scratch now, I'd suggest that you handle things differently. If you'd rather not rewrite it yourself, then I don't know how you will convince someone else to take on that job. You might find it easier to convince Microsoft to add a UTF-8 locale, so then the native encoding would be UTF-8, and the problem would go away. Duncan Murdoch
I can easily understand this is a huge work? and that R Core Team is not ready to endorse it (now? alone?). However, I am not happy at all to read such kind of sarkastic answer from someone belonging to the R Core Team. This is a serious problem in R under Windows and it would make life a lot more easier to everyone if R could be UTF-8 compliant an *all* supported platforms/OSes. Philippe Grosjean
Would it be fairer / more productive to say/ask: * it would be nice if write.table could write files in UTF-8 encoding * is there any documentation already available about which R functions _do_ handle UTF-8 output on Windows, and how they do it? * could they be used as models for adapting write.table to write files in UTF-8 encoding on Windows? i.e., instead of "convert R to output UTF-8 universally on Windows", "figure out how to make write.table output UTF-8 on Windows, or suggest a workaround" ? Ben Bolker
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