[Rd] Error on Windows build: "unable to re-encode"

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 26/02/2010 11:05 AM, Felix Schönbrodt wrote:
> Hi Duncan,
>
> I now declared the endcoding in the DESCRIPTION to UTF-8 (and all files are encoded in that way, too). As my last name is "Schönbrodt", I'd be happy to see it that way in the package ;-)
> However, it still doesn't build on Windows (but works on Mac and Linux). 
>
> Unfortunately I cannot build the Windows packages myself (I work on a Mac), but the win-builder by Uwe Ligges still shows the same error ...
>
> > If declaring the encoding in DESCRIPTION doesn't solve the problem, I'd be happy to take a look at the package.
>
> That's a great offer! I'd be very happy if you could take a look.
> You can find the source at http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/tripler/, a tar.gz is attached as well.


I got the same error as you.  It looks as though iconv has trouble with 
the way some characters are encoded in your file.  For example, on line 
893, you have a u-umlaut encoded as EF BF BD.  According the the UTF-8 
tables at 
http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?start=65280, that 
encodes a question mark in a diamond, "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER".  There's 
no corresponding character in the standard Windows latin1 encoding, so 
conversion fails.  Firefox can display the funny question mark, but it 
doesn't display the u-umlaut as you intended, so I think this is an 
error in your file.

A way to find all such errors is as follows:  read the file as utf-8, 
then use the iconv() function in R to convert it to latin1.  When I do 
that, I get NA on lines 893 and 953, which are displayed to me as

[1] "\t# im latenten Fall: die Error variance erst am Ende berechnen 
(d.h., alle error componenten �ber alle Gruppen mitteln, die unter 
NUll auf Null setzen, dann addieren)"
[2] "\t\t# TODO: �berpr�fen!"    

We might be able to make the error message in the package installer more 
informative (e.g. giving the line number that failed).  I'll look into that.

Duncan Murdoch