R encoding question

-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2010 9:27 PM
To: Xiaobo Gu
Subject: Re: FW: R encoding question

I believe the R Sys.setlocale function only changes it in R, not the entire OS. For
example here we set it to German but the messages from the OS still come out
as English:

Sys.getlocale()

[1] "LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252"

Sys.setlocale(locale="German")

[1]
"LC_COLLATE=German_Germany.1252;LC_CTYPE=German_Germany.1252;LC
_MONETARY=German_Germany.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=German_Ge
rmany.1252"

shell("date")

The current date is: 29/11/2010
Enter the new date: (dd-mm-yy) Warning message:
In shell("date") : 'date' execution failed with error code 1



On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 8:18 AM, Xiaobo Gu <guxiaobo1982 at gmail.com>
wrote:

But Sys.setlocale tries to change the option of the whole OS, I just want only

R to use a specified encoding, how can I do this.

Xiaobo.Gu

-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2010 8:57 PM
To: Xiaobo Gu
Subject: Re: FW: R encoding question

I have never played with encodings myself.  Suggest you read the
postgresql documentation and try different arguments to Sys.setlocale
in R.  You probably have to do that before you initiate the database
since it might not have any effect afterwards. I am not sure this is the

problem but its worth a try.

Here are some examples.

Sys.setlocale(locale="C")
Sys.setlocale(locale="en_NZ.iso88591")
Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US")
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "English")
Sys.setlocale('LC_ALL','fr_FR')
Sys.putenv("LANGUAGE"="EN");Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","EN")
Sys.putenv("LANGUAGE"="FR");Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","FR")


2010/11/29 Xiaobo Gu <guxiaobo1982 at gmail.com>:

Hi,
       Can you help with this.

Regards,

Xiaobo Gu


-----Original Message-----
From: Xiaobo Gu [mailto:guxiaobo1982 at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 10:19 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: R encoding question

Hi,
 I am using RpgSQL to retrieve data from a PostgreSQL database wich
is with encoding UTF8, and I have some Chinese character in one of
the columns, unfortunately R can't show it correctly.

df <- dbGetQuery(con, "select * from test") df

 a            b
1 1 ????\xa2
2 2   ?? EURO\xa1

I see the following option, do I need to change the encoding option
to show the corresponding texts? In my case how to set?

$encoding
[1] "native.enc"

Thanks,
Xiaobo Gu

--
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com

--
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com