substitute accents

Can you please tell us what locale you are working
in?

This looks as if the problem might be the use of a
UTF-8 locale, which R 
does not currently support and which some Linux
distros have made their 
default.  However, R does issue a warning -- so did
you get one?

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Manuel Gutierrez wrote:

I have an openoffice spreadsheet with a column of
character strings.
Some of them contain accents.
I want to read it in R so I have saved it as a csv
file using Western Europe (ISO-8859-1) character

set

(the default, I've tried other sets but it doesn't
help).
R reads it fine with

Say I wan't to replace the 'o' with accent in the
first cell.
I've tried:
gsub('??','o', CharMatrix[1,1])
But, It doesn't make any substitution
Trying to find a solution I input the character

string

in R and do the substitution:
CharMatrix[1,1]<-"h??la"
gsub('??','o', CharMatrix[1,1])
And it works. I think the difference is that when

I

now print the content of CharMatrix I get a \201
before the ?? while I didn't get it with the

openoffice

imported csv file.
I'm sure it is a problem with my understanding of

how

accents can be specified. Can someone give me any
solutions / references?
Thanks,
M

        _
platform i686-pc-linux-gnu
arch     i686
os       linux-gnu
system   i686, linux-gnu
status
major    2
minor    0.0
year     2004
month    10
day      04
language R