Please guide -- UTF-8 locale setting fails on Windows on writing

Le lundi 28 mars 2016 ? 20:12 +0530, Sunny Singha a ?crit :

Milan,
Ok, Let me take a case of facebook. I used Rfacebook package
 to get posts (getPost()) which returns list() of data frames(post,
comments, Likes)

let me demonstrate 2 cases of read and write just as you suggested,
Case 1:::::::::
Lets say one of the facebook comment has below string value, in
Japanese language-->
"?????? - ???????? ?????"

On R console I now assign above string to variableas: x <- "?????? -
???????? ?????"
and write it as below:
write.csv(x, file='x.csv', row.names=F, fileEncoding='UTF-8')
I get this string in the file
"" -
 "

But how do you read back the contents of the file? You need to specify
the encoding when reading it too.

Case 2::::::::::::::
I create a notepad 'x.txt' and save Japanese string "?????? - ???????? ?????"
and read it as below:
read.table('x.txt', fileEncoding='UTF-8'), I get below output:

  V1
1  ?
Warning messages:
1: In read.table("x.txt", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") :
  invalid input found on input connection 'x.txt'
2: In read.table("x.txt", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") :
  incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'x.txt'

Are you sure the notepad saved the text as UTF-8?

Above was for demonstration, I'm infact reading social media data
extracted, which ultimately is somewhere using httr package and
returning data frames.
I'm not sure how should I get it handled in Windows as I don't observe
this behavior in Mac where system locase is set to 'en_US.UTF-8'

Regards,
Sunny




On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 7:39 PM, Milan Bouchet-Valat  wrote:

Le lundi 28 mars 2016 ? 19:16 +0530, Sunny Singha a ?crit :

Hi,
I think I'm experiencing an issue regarding system Locale. I have
exported '.csv' formatted data frames gathered from various social
media platforms like facebook/twitter/G+, etc.

I observe many variable/columns consists of strings formatted similar to below:
"
"

As expected and I confirmed, in social media data, they are strings in
different languages.
Platform details are provide in the end of this mail. OS locale is set
to English (United States) hence 'R' locale is 'English_United
States.1252'

I have attempted to change it to UTF-8 but receives below warning message:

Warning message:
In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "UTF-8") :
  OS reports request to set locale to "UTF-8" cannot be honored

You don't need to set the locale. Just pass an appropriate value (e.g.
"UTF-8") to read.csv() or write.csv()'s fileEncoding argument.

You also didn't tell us what program you used to read these files. Some
might guess the encoding incorrectly, or require you to choose it
manually.


Regards

I have gone through below forums but no resolution so far:
--- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20571147/how-to-set-unicode-locale-in-r
--- https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067940.html
--- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r
--- https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
--- http://withr.me/configure-character-encoding-for-r-under-linux-and-windows/

I'm not sure whether the issue is while reading/extracting the data
from media or while writing/exporting in Windows directory, but I
don't experience similar issue in my personal Mac machine. I need some
clarification here.

How could I export the data just as I see on web ?  Please guide.

Regards,
Sunny

Platform I'm using::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Operating System : Windows 7 Professional SP1
R version details:
platform       x86_64-w64-mingw32
arch           x86_64
os             mingw32
system         x86_64, mingw32
status
major          3
minor          2.3
year           2015
month          12
day            10
svn rev        69752
language       R
version.string R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
nickname       Wooden Christmas-Tree