[Rd] Making iconv portable?

[Spencer Graves]

> On Dec 15, 2014, at 10:13 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Dec 15, 2014, at 12:21 PM, Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at> wrote:
>> 
>>>>>>> Spencer Graves writes:
>> 
>>> Hello, All:  
>>> 	  What would it take to make “iconv” portable?  
>> 
>> 
>>> 	  I ask, because I want to convert accented characters to
>>> 	  vanilla ASCII, thereby converting, e.g., ‘Raúl’ to “Raul”, and
>>> 	  Milan Bouchet-Valet suggested on R-help that I use 'iconv(x,
>>> 	  “", "ASCII//TRANSLIT”)’.  This worked under Windows but failed
>>> 	  on Linux and Mac.  It’s part of the “subNonStandardCharacters”
>>> 	  function in the Ecfun package. The development version on
>>> 	  R-Forge uses this and returns “Raul” under Windows and NA
>>> 	  under Mac OS X (and presumably also Linux).
>> 
>> Hmm.
>> 
>> R> iconv("Raúl", "", "ASCII//TRANSLIT")
>> [1] "Raul"
>> 
>> seems to work for me on Linux ...
>> 
> 
> also on OS X:
> 
>> iconv("Raúl", "", "ASCII//TRANSLIT")
> [1] “Ra'ul"


	  Thanks for the replies.  I should have checked my examples more carefully.  Consider the following example and a slight modification from help(“iconv”):  


> x <- c("Ekstr\xf8m", "J\xf6reskog", "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher")
> Encoding(x) <- "latin1"
> x
[1] "Ekstrøm"               "Jöreskog"              "bißchen Zürcher"      
> iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII//TRANSLIT")  # platform-dependent
[1] "Ekstrom"            "J\"oreskog"         "bisschen Z\"urcher"
> 
> x <- c("Ekstr\xf8m", "J\xf6reskog", "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher")
> x
[1] "Ekstr\xf8m"            "J\xf6reskog"           "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher"
> iconv(x, "", "ASCII//TRANSLIT")  # platform-dependent
[1] NA NA NA 


	  This suggests a two-step fix to my problem:  (1) Check Encoding(x) and set to “latin1” if it’s “unknown”.  (2) Delete any new \” added by iconv.  


	  Thanks again, 
	  Spencer 

> 
> 
> 
>> -k
>> 
>> 
>>> 	 The “iconv” R code merely calls compiled code, which I’ve used very little in 30 years.   
>> 
>> 
>>> 	  Thanks, 
>>> 	  Spencer 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>>> On Nov 30, 2014, at 2:32 AM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com <mailto:spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Wonderful.  Thanks very much.  Spencer
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 11/30/2014 2:25 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
>> 
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>> 
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