list.files() not compatible with all Unicode characters; file.exists() is compatible.

Hello,I have some files with strange Unicode characters in their names that I am trying to remove.But list.files() does not return their names faithfully so that I can deal with them.
list.files()[1] "? text.txt" ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<--- here you should see a question mark, a space, then text.txt> file.exists("? text.txt") ? ?<----by copying and pasting the output from above[1] FALSE> file.exists('? text.txt') ? ?<--- here you should see a black triangle, what looks like a space, and text.txt[1] TRUE
Documentation for file.exists() and file.access() do not seem to discuss this.
The file name has these Unicode characters:BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR U+23EF BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR ?BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE U+25B6 BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE ?
Thank you!CheersNissim KaufmannNSOL.altervista.org
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Don MacQueen

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7000 East Ave., L-627
Livermore, CA 94550
925-423-1062

On 11/24/14, 11:07 AM, "Nissim Kaufmann" <nissimkaufmann at yahoo.com> wrote:

>Hello,I have some files with strange Unicode characters in their names
>that I am trying to remove.But list.files() does not return their names
>faithfully so that I can deal with them.
>> list.files()[1] "? text.txt"                  <--- here you should see
>>a question mark, a space, then text.txt> file.exists("? text.txt")
>><----by copying and pasting the output from above[1] FALSE>
>>file.exists('? text.txt')    <--- here you should see a black triangle,
>>what looks like a space, and text.txt[1] TRUE
>Documentation for file.exists() and file.access() do not seem to discuss
>this.
>The file name has these Unicode characters:BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE
>WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR U+23EF BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE WITH DOUBLE
>VERTICAL BAR ?BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE U+25B6 BLACK RIGHT-POINTING
>TRIANGLE ?
>Thank you!CheersNissim KaufmannNSOL.altervista.org
>	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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>PLEASE do read the posting guide
>http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
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Also, the 'at a minimum' information requested by the posting guide is 
essential here (which OS and locale, in particular).  In general file 
names not in the locale's encoding are unsupported.
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK
On 25/11/2014 01:25, MacQueen, Don wrote:
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email.
Please send plain text

Also, the 'at a minimum' information requested by the posting guide is
essential here (which OS and locale, in particular).  In general file
names not in the locale's encoding are unsupported.
An off-list reply indicated this was Windows XP.  Although the message 
body was unreadable, the gist is in the subject line.

 From ?list.files under Windows

   path must specify paths which can be represented in the current
   codepage.

whereas ?file.exists says

   Most of these functions accept UTF-8 filepaths not valid in the
   current locale.

So this is documented behaviour.

[For anyone curious as to why list.files is different: note that it does 
regexp pattern matching.  Adding support for Unicode file paths would 
not be impossible but it would require hundreds of lines of Windows-only 
code.]
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK