accented vowels
On 11-08-15 2:42 PM, Denis Chabot wrote:
Hi,
I usually do not give second thought to accented vowels and R handles everything fine thanks to UTF8 being used in my R scripts. But today I have a problem. Accented vowels do not behave properly when they were imported into R using list.files.
Maybe this is because OS X (I'm using 10.6.8) still uses MacRoman for file names, though visually the names seem to have been read correctly into R.
An example is better than words:
sessionInfo()
R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit)
locale:
[1] fr_CA.UTF-8/fr_CA.UTF-8/C/C/fr_CA.UTF-8/fr_CA.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
This does not cause problem:
a = c("1_MO2 crevettes po2crit.Rda", "1_MO2 soles S?te sda.Rda", "1_MO2 turbots po2crit.Rda"); a
[1] "1_MO2 crevettes po2crit.Rda" "1_MO2 soles S?te sda.Rda" "1_MO2 turbots po2crit.Rda"
a2 = gsub(" S?te", "S", a); a2
[1] "1_MO2 crevettes po2crit.Rda" "1_MO2 solesS sda.Rda" "1_MO2 turbots po2crit.Rda"
but if instead of creating the vector within the R script, I read it as a series of file names, the substitution does not work. I am sorry that I cannot make this a reproducible example as it requires the 3 files to exist on your computer, but you could create 3 dummy files having the same names in the directory of your choice.
don = file.path("donn?es/")
b = list.files(path = don, pattern = "1_MO2"); b
[1] "1_MO2 crevettes po2crit.Rda" "1_MO2 soles S?te sda.Rda" "1_MO2 turbots po2crit.Rda"
b2 = gsub(" S?te", "S", b); b2
[1] "1_MO2 crevettes po2crit.Rda" "1_MO2 soles S?te sda.Rda" "1_MO2 turbots po2crit.Rda"
I am puzzled and also "stuck". For now I'll modify the file name, but I need to be able to handle such names at some point.
Any advice?
Possibly your system really is using MacRoman or some other local encoding; in that case, iconv(x, "", "UTF-8") should convert from the local encoding to UTF-8. I think declaring everything to be UTF8 may be sufficient. When I use list.files(), I see the encoding listed as "unknown", but x <- list.files() Encoding(x) <- "UTF-8" works. However, the iconv() method should be safer. Duncan Murdoch