Unicode characters in script?
On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Aug 11, 2011, at 2:35 PM, Michael Hoban wrote:
Hi all- I tried searching before posting, but this is one of those tricky questions to search for. My issue is this: within the R.app gui, I can use extended characters in plot labels without any issue (specifically in my case the ?, lowercase delta), for example:
plot(c(1:10) ~ c(1:10), main="?foobie bletch?")
However, when I try to do the same in a script from the terminal (interpreted by Rscript), I get a bunch of errors related to character encoding: .... conversion failure on '?foobie bletch?' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <e2> .... Is there a way to make this work? Or is Rscript not equipped to handle multibyte characters?
It seems your'e running Rscript in a locale that doesn't support unicode (probably C). Make sure you use UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.UTF-8)
Maybe: but because he blatently ignored the posting guide, we don't know. Another possibility is that he is using a graphics device that does not support those characters (and again, we have not been told). Using Greek characters requires the postscript() and pdf() devices to be told to work in Greek, as their help pages (and the R manuals) makes clear. It is those graphics languages (and not Rscript) which do not support Unicode. You will also need viewers that support the Greek characters ....
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595