[Rd] iconv to UTF-16 encoding produces error due to embedded nulls (write.table with fileEncoding param)

[nospam at altfeld-im.de]

Dear R developers

I think I have found a bug that can be reproduced with two lines of code
and I am very thankful to get your first assessment or feed-back on my
report.

If this is the wrong mailing list or I did something wrong
(e. g. semi "anonymous" email address to protect my privacy and defend
unwanted spam) please let me know since I am new here.

Thank you very much :-)

J. Altfeld

On Tue, 2016-02-16 at 18:25 +0100, nospam at altfeld-im.de wrote:
> 
> 
> If I execute the code from the "?write.table" examples section
> 
>   x <- data.frame(a = I("a \" quote"), b = pi)
>   # (ommited code)
>   write.csv(x, file = "foo.csv", fileEncoding = "UTF-16LE")
> 
> the resulting CSV file has a size of 6 bytes which is too short
> (truncated):
> 
>   """,3
> 
> The problem seems to be the iconv function:
> 
>   iconv("foo", to="UTF-16")
> 
> produces
> 
>   Error in iconv("foo", to = "UTF-16"):
>   embedded nul in string: '\xff\xfef\0o\0o\0'
> 
> In 2010 a (partial) patch for this problem was submitted:
> 
> http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e10/devel/10/06/0648.html
> 
> Are there chances to fix this problem since it prevents writing Windows
> UTF-16LE text files?
> 
> 
> 
> PS: This problem can be reproduced on Windows and Linux.
> 
> ---------------
> 
> > sessionInfo()
> R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
> Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
> Running under: Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS
> 
> locale:
>  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
> LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
>  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
> LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
>  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
> LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
> base     
> 
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] tools_3.2.3
> >
> 
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