Submitting an updated package version to CRAN (Warning: non-ASCII characters)
On 21/05/2016 21:25, Luck Buttered wrote:
Dear all:
I am updating the version of an R package I submitted last year on CRAN and
came across two questions that I would be grateful to seek any input about:
1) In the updated version of the package, I am adding a second example
dataset. This example dataset is a subset of a public database that
contains thousands of names. Upon running devtools::check(), I am only
getting one warning. ("Warning: found non-ASCII strings").
It seems this warning is coming from special characters in some of the
names. As it is ideal that the names should not be altered, I did not know
what approach to take. Should I simply include a note in my CRAN submission
indicating that the non-ASCII characters are meaningfully inherent to the
example data? Or, should I convert the names to ASCII characters (if that
is easily possible for so many cases), and indicate to users that names
have been altered (special characters removed)?
You should follow the advice of the manual: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Encoding-issues . There is not enough detail here to know what you currently do (let alone what you should do), but that message indicates that the encoding of non-ASCII stings (what you call 'special characters') has not been declared (and to be portable they should be in UTF-8).
2) I have never submitted an updated version of a package to CRAN. I am considering following a similar process to what I did to submit my original version of the package to CRAN. That is, using devtools::release() and including a note in a file called cran-comments.md to indicate that this is not an original version submission, but rather, an updated version submission. I found these advice on Hadley Wickhams site ( http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/release.html), but could not determine if this was appropriate for version update submissions as well.
There is a list for discussing package preparation, r-package-devel.
Thank you for sharing any advice!
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford