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[R-pkg-devel] Fix non-ASCII characters in R packages

7 messages · Peter Dalgaard, Ivan Krylov, Uwe Ligges +1 more

#
Hi all,

I am trying to update my R package on CRAN but I am being requested to fix
this NOTE:

checking data for non-ASCII characters ... NOTE Note: found 58 marked
Latin-1 strings

I have used to code below to identify my scripts that have strings using
non-ASCII characters. The problem is that in most cases these non-ASCII
characters are used in the documentation of functions, so I cannot simply
convert their encoding using iconv() for example

# Find scripts using non-ASCII characters
  f <- list.files(pattern = "*.R", recursive = T)
  r <- lapply(f, tools::showNonASCIIfile)

I've tried (1) reopening and (2) resaving those scripts with UTF-8
encoding, (3) setting UTF-8 as the default encoding of the project, but
nothing seems to fix this issue. Any suggestions?

obs. I've posted this question on SO
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59139923/fix-non-ascii-characters-in-r-packages

best,

Rafael Pereira
#
Dunno if it helps, but the NOTE is about "checking data", which, as far as I can decipher the code, means that it is looking at datasets in the data/ directory. So I suspect that looking at *.R files is not going to be the right thing to do.

-pd

  
    
#
On Mon, 2 Dec 2019 10:57:51 -0300
Rafael Pereira <rafa.pereira.br at gmail.com> wrote:

            
I don't think it's about non-ASCII in source code; it's about Latin-1
strings in the package data:

git clone https://github.com/ipeaGIT/geobr
cd geobr/data
R
load('grid_state_correspondence_table.RData')
sum(
 unlist(
  lapply(grid_state_correspondence_table, Encoding)
 ) == 'latin1'
)
# [1] 58

What I'm not sure of is *how* this NOTE should be fixed. "Writing R
extensions" ?1.6.3 provides advice on UTF-8 strings in the R code, not
data; ?5.15 only says that strings *could* be marked as Latin-1 or
UTF-8 (but doesn't say what *should* be done); finally,
tools:::.check_package_datasets seems to produce NOTEs about Latin-1,
UTF-8 and strings marked as bytes.
#
On 02.12.2019 15:29, peter dalgaard wrote:
Have we really asked you to fix these?
Which packages is this?

Best,
Uwe Ligges
#
Thanks for the heads up, Ivan. In any case, I?ll change the encoding of the database. 

Uwe, I?m faxing this issue in the geobr package 

Rafael H.M. Pereira
#
OK, but this note did not lead to a rejection (and the mail we sent did 
not even include the Note you apparently cited from the check.log)

The actual issues are:


   Found the following (possibly) invalid URLs:
     URL: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/geobr/index.html
       From: README.md
             NEWS.md
       Status: 200
       Message: OK
       CRAN URL not in canonical form

     URL: 
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/geobr/vignettes/intro_to_geobr.html
       From: README.md
       Status: 200
       Message: OK
       CRAN URL not in canonical form

     The canonical URL of the CRAN page for a package is
       https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=pkgname


Flavor: r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc, r-devel-windows-ix86+x86_64
Check: for hidden files and directories, Result: NOTE
   Found the following hidden files and directories:
     .travis.yml
   These were most likely included in error. See section 'Package
   structure' in the 'Writing R Extensions' manual.



Best,
Uwe Ligges
On 02.12.2019 18:46, Rafael Pereira wrote:
#
Thank you for the clarification,  Uwe Ligges.

best,

Rafael Pereira

On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 4:36 PM Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
wrote: