[ESS] German umlaute in ESS, Emacs & R

[svga at arcor.de]

I agree, using non-ASCII characters in variable names is a hassle. Unfortunately, these variable names are common in my working area. I find this issue interesting, because german umlauts as a value in a variable is no problem:

> g <- "Säge"; plot(1:10, ylab=g)
> g
[1] "Säge"

works, but

> ä <- 2
Error: unexpected input in "\201"

Btw.: I have no problems with these under Linux.

Best, Sven

----- Original Nachricht ----
Von:     Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
An:      enno_sandkasten at arcor.de
Datum:   31.07.2008 18:30
Betreff: Re: [ESS] German umlaute in ESS, Emacs & R

> >>>>> "es" == enno sandkasten <enno_sandkasten at arcor.de>
> >>>>>     on Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:17:38 +0200 (CEST) writes:
> 
>     es> Hi list,
>     es> I use GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2008-03-26 on
> Windows XP and ESS Version 5.3.7, both downloaded from
> http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/ressources/emacs/, and R version 2.7.1 for
> Windows.
> 
>     es> My problem is that Emacs cannot handle german umlaute as R variable
> names:
> 
>     >> ä <- 3
>     es> Error: unexpected input in "\201"
> 
>     es> This does not occur in RGui.exe. I think this is more an emacs than
> ess problem, but maybe there are any suggestions.
> 
> Yes, it seems an Emacs rather than ESS problem, also visible on
> Linux.
> I can reproduce the problem also by starting R from the *shell* (M-x
> shell) buffer, hence it's not related to ESS,
> but most probably related to how emacs uses the 'comint-*'
> functions to communicate with the "inferior" process.
> I see the problem in all cases (within Emacs),
> both when then emacs-input (and -output method of the process is set to 
> utf-8 or iso-latin-1 respectively {C-x RET p ...; 
> C-x RET C-h shows you the list} and both for my default unicode
> utf-8 locale and with the C locale.
> 
> OTOH, I can use 'ä' in the emacs shell more less fine:
> I can use it for input, but it does not correctly render for
> output.
> 
>   $ touch ä   << shows Umlaut
>   $ ls -l ä   << shows Umlaut
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 maechler sfsstaff 0 Jul 31 18:25 ? << shows question mark
>   "?" (
>   $ . /u/sfs/adm/locale-deCH-UTF8.sh
>   $ ls -l ä <
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 maechler sfsstaff 0 Jul 31 18:25 ?
>   $ echo BLA >> ä
>   $ ls -l ä
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 maechler sfsstaff 4 Jul 31 18:25 ?
> 
> 
> BTW: I would never use non-ASCII characters in variable names,
>       but that's really a separate issue;
>  and I can imagine people having "good" reasons to do so.
>  Note that it *can* dangerous: I see different files created by
>  'touch ä' depending on the locale (ISO-latin-1 vs Unicode UTF-8)
> 
> 
> Martin
>