[Rd] ASCIIfy() - a proposal for package:tools

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 17/04/2014 12:47 PM, Gregory R. Warnes wrote:
> Hi Arni,
>
> I’ll be glad to drop ASCIIfy into gtools.  Let me know if this OK.

Thanks, that sounds like a great solution if Arni doesn't want his own 
package.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> -Greg
>
> On Apr 17, 2014, at 9:46 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Nobody else has replied to this, so I will.  It's very unlikely that we would incorporate this function into base R.  For one thing, the tools package is intended to be tools used by R, not by users.  R doesn't need this function, so it doesn't belong in tools.  (Some other functions in tools like showNonASCII have come to be used by users, but their primary purpose is for R.)
> >
> > Utility functions that are maintained by R Core and are useful to users belong in the utils package.  But I wouldn't add ASCIIfy to that package either, because I don't want to impose its maintenance on R Core.
> >
> > Utility functions that are maintained by others belong in contributed packages.  So I'd suggest that you add this function to some package that you maintain (perhaps a new one, containing a collection of related utility functions), or search CRAN for an appropriate package with a maintainer who is willing to take this on.
> >
> > Duncan Murdoch
> >
> > On 15/04/2014 1:48 PM, Arni Magnusson wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I would like to propose the attached function ASCIIfy() to be added to the
> >> 'tools' package.
> >>
> >> Non-ASCII characters in character vectors can be problematic for R
> >> packages, but sometimes they cannot be avoided. To make packages portable
> >> and build without 'R CMD check' warnings, my solution has been to convert
> >> problematic characters in functions and datasets to escaped ASCII, so
> >> plot(1,main="São Paulo") becomes plot(1,main="S\u00e3o Paulo").
> >>
> >> The showNonASCII() function in package:tools is helpful to identify R
> >> source files where characters should be converted to ASCII one way or
> >> another, but I could not find a function to actually perform the
> >> conversion to ASCII.
> >>
> >> I have written the function ASCIIfy() to convert character vectors to
> >> ASCII. I imagine other R package developers might be looking for a similar
> >> tool, and it seems to me that package:tools is the first place they would
> >> look, where the R Core Team has provided a variety of tools for handling
> >> non-ASCII characters in package development.
> >>
> >> I hope the R Core Team will adopt ASCIIfy() into the 'tools' package, to
> >> make life easier for package developers outside the English-speaking
> >> world. I have of course no problem with them renaming or rewriting the
> >> function in any way.
> >>
> >> See the attached examples - all in flat ASCII that was prepared using the
> >> function itself! The main objective, though, is to ASCIIfy functions and
> >> datasets, not help pages.
> >>
> >> Arni
> >>
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
> >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
> > ______________________________________________
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>