readOGR and nonASCII character

Hi list,

Is there any way to get readOGR() to correctly read
non-ascii character strings from the dbf file? I've
checked and my dbf file correctly displays
names with accents, but once read into R
accents are substituted by wrong symbols.

Agus

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Agustin Lobo wrote:

Hi list,

Is there any way to get readOGR() to correctly read
non-ascii character strings from the dbf file? I've
checked and my dbf file correctly displays
names with accents, but once read into R
accents are substituted by wrong symbols.

We are dependent on what GDAL/OGR gives us here. Please try the 
equivalent function in maptools for your shapefile, and see whether the 
read.dbf() in foreign does any better. I'm assuming that you know the 
locale settings of your platform, and of the originating platform from 
sessionInfo()?

Roger

Agus

Roger,

read.shapefile() and read.dbf() yields weird symbols for non-ascii characters 
in the input file also.
Exporting to csv and reading in with read.csv(filename,sep=";") works fine 
(yes, it's odd, excel puts ";" instead of "," for CSV in spanish locale as
"," could be used for decimal separation)

My session.info output is:

 sessionInfo()

R version 2.5.0 (2007-04-23)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_CTYPE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_MONETARY=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Spanish_Spain.1252

attached base packages:
[1] "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets" "methods" 
"base"

other attached packages:
  spatstat       mgcv shapefiles   maptools    foreign      rgdal sp
 "1.11-7"   "1.3-23"      "0.6"   "0.6-13"   "0.8-20"   "0.5-13" "0.9-14"

Agus

Roger Bivand escribi?:

 On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Agustin Lobo wrote:

 Hi list,

 Is there any way to get readOGR() to correctly read
 non-ascii character strings from the dbf file? I've
 checked and my dbf file correctly displays
 names with accents, but once read into R
 accents are substituted by wrong symbols.

 We are dependent on what GDAL/OGR gives us here. Please try the equivalent
 function in maptools for your shapefile, and see whether the read.dbf() in
 foreign does any better. I'm assuming that you know the locale settings of
 your platform, and of the originating platform from sessionInfo()?

 Roger

 Agus

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Agustin Lobo wrote:

Roger,

read.shapefile() and read.dbf() yields weird symbols for non-ascii 
characters in the input file also.
Exporting to csv and reading in with read.csv(filename,sep=";") works 
fine (yes, it's odd, excel puts ";" instead of "," for CSV in spanish 
locale as
"," could be used for decimal separation)

(See read.csv2())

So a possible work-around is to use CSV or text files to transfer the 
affected character values. There are lots of possible difficulties when 
the data are generated by one program making some assumptions and then 
read by a different program with different assumptions. read.table() and 
friends do have an encoding= argument to assign a known code to 
character strings. There is a short note in the Data Import-Export 
manual, and much more about locales in the installation and 
administration manual.

Roger

My session.info output is:

 sessionInfo()

R version 2.5.0 (2007-04-23)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_CTYPE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_MONETARY=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Spanish_Spain.1252 


attached base packages:
[1] "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets" 
"methods" "base"

other attached packages:
  spatstat       mgcv shapefiles   maptools    foreign      rgdal sp
 "1.11-7"   "1.3-23"      "0.6"   "0.6-13"   "0.8-20"   "0.5-13" "0.9-14"

Agus

Roger Bivand escribi?:

 On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Agustin Lobo wrote:

 Hi list,

 Is there any way to get readOGR() to correctly read

 non-ascii character strings from the dbf file? I've
 checked and my dbf file correctly displays
 names with accents, but once read into R
 accents are substituted by wrong symbols.

 We are dependent on what GDAL/OGR gives us here. Please try the 
equivalent
 function in maptools for your shapefile, and see whether the 
read.dbf() in
 foreign does any better. I'm assuming that you know the locale 
settings of
 your platform, and of the originating platform from sessionInfo()?

 Roger

 Agus