String encoding problem

On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Duncan Murdoch

On 07/07/2016 10:57 AM, Hadley Wickham wrote:

If you print:

"\xc9\x82\xbf"

you get

 "\u0242\xbf"

But if you try and evaluate that string you get:

 "\u0242\xbf"

Error: mixing Unicode and octal/hex escapes in a string is not allowed

(Probably will only happen on mac/linux with default utf-8 encoding)

I'm not sure what should happen here, but that's not a legal string in a
UTF-8 locale, so it's not too surprising that things go wonky.

Here's bit more context on how I got that sequence of bytes:

x <- "?????"
y <- iconv(x, to = "Shift-JIS")
Encoding(y)
y

I did this to create an example to demonstrate how to handle encoding
problems, and it's bit frustrating that I have to manually mangle the
string in order to be able to re-use it in another session.  Maybe
strings with unknown encoding shouldn't use unicode escapes?

Hadley

http://hadley.nz