Patrick Perry <mailto:pperry at stern.nyu.edu>
September 14, 2017 at 7:47 AM
This particular issue has a simple fix. Currently, the
"R_check_locale" function includes the following code starting at line
244 in src/main/platform.c:
#ifdef Win32
{
char *ctype = setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL), *p;
p = strrchr(ctype, '.');
if (p && isdigit(p[1])) localeCP = atoi(p+1); else localeCP = 0;
/* Not 100% correct, but CP1252 is a superset */
known_to_be_latin1 = latin1locale = (localeCP == 1252);
}
#endif
The "1252" should be "28591"; see
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd317756(v=vs.85).aspx
.
Daniel Possenriede <mailto:possenriede at gmail.com>
September 14, 2017 at 3:40 AM
This is a follow-up on my initial posts regarding character encodings
on Windows
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-August/074728.html) and
Patrick Perry's reply
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-August/074830.html) in
particular (thank you for the links and the bug report!). My initial
posts were quite chaotic (and partly wrong), so I am trying to clear
things up a bit.
Actually, the title of my original message "special latin1
[characters] do not print as glyphs in current devel on windows" is
already wrong, because the problem exists with characters with CP1252
encoding in the 80-9F (hex) range. Like Brian Ripley rightfully
pointed out, latin1 != CP1252. The characters in the 80-9F code point
range are not even part of ISO/IEC 8859-1 a.k.a. latin1, see for
example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252. R treats them as
if they were, however, and that is exactly the problem, IMHO.
Let me show you what I mean. (All output from R 3.5 r73238, see
sessionInfo at the end)
Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE")
[1] "German_Germany.1252"
x <- c("?", "?", "?", "?")
sapply(x, charToRaw)
\u0080 \u009e \u009a ?
80 9e 9a fc
"?", "?", "?" serve as examples in the 80-9F range of CP1252. I also
show the "?" just as an example of a non-ASCII character outside that
range (and because Patrick Perry used it in his bug report which might
be a (slightly) different problem, but I will get to that later.)
[1] "\u0080" "\u009e" "\u009a" "?"
"?", "?", and "?" are printed as (incorrect) unicode escapes. "?" for
example should be \u20ac not \u0080.
(In R 3.4.1, print(x) shows the glyphs and not the unicode escapes.
Apparently, as of v3.5, print() calls enc2utf8() (or its equivalent in
C (translateCharUTF8?))?)
[1] "?"
The characters in x are marked as "latin1".
[1] "latin1" "latin1" "latin1" "latin1"
Looking at the CP1252 table (e.g. link above), we see that this is
incorrect for "?", "?", and "?", which simply do not exist in latin1.
As per the documentation, "enc2utf8 convert[s] elements of character
vectors to [...] UTF-8 [...], taking any marked encoding into
account." Since the marked encoding is wrong, so is the output of
enc2utf8().
[1] "\u0080" "\u009e" "\u009a" "?"
Now, when we set the encoding to "unknown" everything works fine.
x_un <- x
Encoding(x_un) <- "unknown"
print(x_un)
(x_un2utf8 <- enc2utf8(x_un))
[1] "?" "?" "?" "?"
Long story short: The characters in the 80 to 9F range should not be
marked as "latin1" on CP1252 locales, IMHO.
As a side-note: the output of localeToCharset() is also problematic,
since ISO8859-1 != CP1252.
[1] "ISO8859-1"
Finally on to Patrick Perry's bug report
(https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17329): 'On
Windows, enc2utf8("?") yields "|".'
Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce this with the CP1252 locale, as can
be seen above. Probably, because the bug applies to the C locale
(sorry if this is somewhere apparent in the bug report and I missed it).
Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "C")
[1] "unknown"
This does not seem to be related to the marked encoding of the string,
so it seems to me that this is a different problem than the one above.
Any advice on how to proceed further would be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
Daniel
R Under development (unstable) (2017-09-11 r73238)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 14393)
Matrix products: default
locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=German_Germany.1252 LC_CTYPE=C
[3] LC_MONETARY=German_Germany.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=German_Germany.1252
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.5.0
Patrick Perry <mailto:pperry at stern.nyu.edu>
August 27, 2017 at 11:40 AM
Regarding the Windows character encoding issues Daniel Possenriede
posted about earlier this month, where non-Latin-1 strings were
getting marked as such
(https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-August/074731.html ):
The issue is that on Windows, when the character locale is
Windows-1252, R marks some (possibly all) native non-ASCII strings as
"latin1". I posted a related bug report:
https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17329 . The bug
report also includes a link to a fix for a related issue: converting
strings from Windows native to UTF-8.
There is a work-around for this bug in the current development version
of the 'corpus' package (not on CRAN yet). See
https://github.com/patperry/r-corpus/issues/5 . I have tested this on
a Windows-1252 install of R, but I have not tested it on a Windows
install in another locale. It'd be great if someone with such an
install would test the fix and report back, either here or on the
github issue.
Patrick