[Rd] Submitting an updated package version to CRAN (Warning: non-ASCII characters)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 21/05/2016 21:25, Luck Buttered wrote:
> Dear all:
>
> I am updating the version of an R package I submitted last year on CRAN and
> came across two questions that I would be grateful to seek any input about:
>
> 1) In the updated version of the package, I am adding a second example
> dataset. This example dataset is a subset of a public database that
> contains thousands of names. Upon running devtools::check(), I am only
> getting one warning. ("Warning: found non-ASCII strings").
>
> It seems this warning is coming from special characters in some of the
> names. As it is ideal that the names should not be altered, I did not know
> what approach to take. Should I simply include a note in my CRAN submission
> indicating that the non-ASCII characters are meaningfully inherent to the
> example data? Or, should I convert the names to ASCII characters (if that
> is easily possible for so many cases), and indicate to users that names
> have been altered (special characters removed)?

You should follow the advice of the manual: 
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Encoding-issues 
.  There is not enough detail here to know what you currently do (let 
alone what you should do), but that message indicates that the encoding 
of non-ASCII stings (what you call 'special characters') has not been 
declared (and to be portable they should be in UTF-8).

> 2) I have never submitted an updated version of a package to CRAN. I am
> considering following a similar process to what I did to submit my original
> version of the package to CRAN. That is, using devtools::release() and
> including a note in a file called cran-comments.md to indicate that this is
> not an original version submission, but rather, an updated version
> submission. I found these advice on Hadley Wickhams site (
> http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/release.html), but could not determine if this was
> appropriate for version update submissions as well.

There is a list for discussing package preparation, r-package-devel.

> Thank you for sharing any advice!



-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford