Native characterset is wrong for unicode builds for Windows

On 26/02/2015 6:34 PM, maillist at tlink.de wrote:

On 26/02/2015 3:09 PM, maillist at tlink.de wrote:

When I send some outlandish characters through enc2native (or format) in
R 3.1.2 on Ubuntu trusty it works quite well:

   > "?????"

[1] "?????"

   > enc2native("?????")

[1] "?????"

   > Encoding(enc2native("?????"))

[1] "UTF-8"

In Windows the result is different:

   > "?????"

[1] "?????"

   > enc2native("?????")

[1] "??<U+0394><U+040A><U+05EA>"

   > Encoding(enc2native("?????"))

[1] "latin1"

And this is wrong. The native character set of a unicode application
under Windows is *Unicode*. enc2native should do the same under Windows
as it does on Ubuntu. Also the "unknown" encoding should be changed to
mean the same as "UTF-8" exactly as it is on Linux.

What is a "unicode application", and what makes you think R is one?  R
is being told by Windows that your native encoding is latin1.  Perhaps
Windows 8 supports UTF-8 as a native encoding (I've never used it), but
previous versions of Windows didn't.

Duncan Murdoch

A unicode application is a program that uses the unicode API of Windows

R uses those functions, so I guess it is a "unicode application".  But
internally it uses an 8 bit encoding (normally the native one for the
platform it is running on, which in your case is apparently latin1).

- the functions with the ending W. For such a application the system
code page (native encoding) is completely irrelevant. The system code
page is just a compatibility feature that enables Windows NT/Vista/7/8
to run applications that were developed for Windows 95 which didn't have
unicode support.

Windows 95 had UCS-2 support, which was pretty close to UTF-16.

But this line of operating systems is dead for 10 years

now. R obviously is a unicode application because it can print - or read
from the clipboard - characters like "???" that are not in my system
code page which is not possible over the legacy API.

So "unicode application" is something you just made up.

If you use Windows development tools, they have macros to convert
generic functions to either A or W versions.  R doesn't use those.  It
calls the W functions when it has UTF-16 characters, and A functions
when it has native characters.  I would love it if R was a UTF-8
application, because it would make life so much simpler, but Windows
doesn't support that.  So R needs to do tons of conversions.  If you
don't like that, you probably need to stick with Ubuntu.

Duncan Murdoch