Unicode characters in script?

Mylke,

Have you tried using the "\u###" tool, where ### is the Unicode number? For
example,

plot(c(1:10) ~ c(1:10), main="\u2202 foobie bletch \u0192")

produces a del character and italics function "f". You may wish to use
different Unicode characters, but these were the first character codes I
found.

To look up the Unicode numbers, I personally like to use the "insert special
characters" tool in Pages, which may be found at:

Edit -> Special characters

Alternatively, a web search for "Unicode characters" should give you several
sites to find this information at as well.

Hope this helps!

Richard Erickson

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Michael Hoban <mhoban at ucsc.edu> 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?

thanks in advance,

_mykle

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?

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)

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