[Rd] Making iconv portable?

[Simon Urbanek]

On Dec 15, 2014, at 1:37 PM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 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”.

Well, that depends heavily on your source. In the above it is hand-crafted latin1 so if you don't declare it, the native encoding will be assumed - which can be anything and has nothing to do with your actual input in this particular case where you hand-constructed latin1.


>  (2) Delete any new \” added by iconv.  
> 

The whole point of translit is to create combinations of ASCII characters that represent the unicode characters, so " is just one many characters that can be used.

Cheers,
S


> 
> 	  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:
>>> 
>>>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>> 
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