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

[Duncan Murdoch]

Felix Schönbrodt wrote:
> Thanks for your help - that was the solution (easy enough to remove these two characters - they've been in only comments anyway).
> Fortunately, the DECRIPTION file accepts umlauts, as in my second name. The problem was only in the source file.
>   

I think comments in R code could also include umlauts, but they need to 
be encoded in a way that can be converted to Latin1 on Windows.  I don't 
know why yours weren't.  Did those characters look like u-umlaut on your 
system?  What editor did you use to produce that file?

I'm not sure what the consequences would be of allowing unrepresentable 
characters to be mapped to question marks or hex codes (with a 
warning).  I think it would slow down the processing a bit (because 
those lines would need to be processed twice: once to detect that they 
have some bad characters, a second time to replace them).  I'm not sure 
if it would slow down processing of files that include no bad chars.  
I'll take a look.

Duncan Murdoch


> Felix
>
>
> Am 26.02.2010 um 18:37 schrieb 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
>>
>>
>>     
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>