[Rd] Support writing UTF-8 output in Windows

[Sverre Stausland]

With respect to your comment (sorry, the e-mail you wrote that in
didn't get to my inbox):

>> I don't think so.  In general, functions that convert to the native
>> encoding break UTF-8 on Windows, because the native encoding is often
>> Latin1 or some other encoding that doesn't cover all the characters in
>> UTF-8.

As I understand it, the native encoding in Windows is UTF-18, not Latin1:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd374081.aspx

And UTF-18 is a superset of UTF-8, isn't it?

Sverre

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13-11-10 7:31 AM, Sverre Stausland wrote:
>>
>> My e-mail was intended as a typical "feature request", and I couldn't
>> find any more suitable place for that than the r-devel mailing list. I
>> am not a programmer, so I don't have the skills to write this into R's
>> source code myself.
>>
>> The incentive is nevertheless clear enough. I believe a software
>> program in 2013 which imports, manipulates, and exports text in
>> various formats (text files, picture files, postscript files, etc.)
>> would normally be expected to support UTF-8. It might not be trivial
>> to implement as R is written now, but the expectation will still be
>> there. So I still believe it would be a good idea if R soon would be
>> able to support UTF-8.
>
>
> R does support UTF-8.  It all works smoothly in a UTF-8 locale, not so
> smoothly if you have your computer set up to use a different 8 bit encoding.
>
>>
>> I'm not quite able to piece together from the information you gave
>> what the underlying issues are. What I read is:
>> (1) Some R functions convert characters to the native encoding.
>> (2) Windows did not support UTF-8 when R was first written.
>> (3) Unix did not support UCS-2 when R was first written.
>>
>> I'm guessing here that the implications are:
>> (1) R's write.table() converts characters to a native encoding.
>> (2) The native encoding in Windows 7 is not UTF-8.
>> (3) The native encoding in Unix systems is UTF-8.
>
>
> You got it right for the first 4.  Regarding (2) in your second list, that's
> right, and in fact UTF-8 is not supported as a native encoding.
> And point (3) is optional, though UTF-8 is the dominant encoding nowadays.
>
> The easiest solution is for you to switch to a Unix variant and set it up to
> use UTF-8 as the native encoding.
>
> Next easiest would be for Microsoft to add UTF-8 as a code page.
>
> Most difficult would be for R to handle UTF-8 properly on systems with
> limited support for it.
>
> We probably will add small changes that let you work around the Windows
> problems, but they won't be very satisfactory to anyone.  I don't think we
> will make the big changes that would make R look like "a software program in
> 2013", since it would be so much work, and there's such an easy workaround.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
>> But this is just guesswork.
>
>
>
>>
>> PS. A related issue:
>>
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19881553/using-unicode-inside-rs-expression-command
>>
>> Sverre
>>
>