You are not saying which platform you are working on but my guess would 
be that the two locales have different character encodings.  Try 
specifying the encoding explicitly in the format that is right for your 
platform; when I try to replicate your examples using

Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "he_IL.utf8")
Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_GB.utf8")

(which is the correct syntax for my Fedora 14 Linux system) I do not see 
a problem, but changing the ".utf8" bit to something else for the second 
call exhibits similar behaviour to your example.

Hope this helps a little.

Allan.

R version 2.13.0 Under development (unstable) (2010-12-14 r53851)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)


On 10/12/10 10:40, Tal Galili wrote:
> <I was not sure if this should go to R-devel or R-help.  If I e-mailed this
> to the wrong place, please let me know.>
>
> Hello dear R-devel members,
>
> I came by an oddity, with regards to how character variables are being
> transformed when they are in Hebrew, and when Sys.setlocale is changed.
>
> Here is an example:
>
>
> # first, let's set the locale to Hebrew
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "Hebrew") # Setting locale
> x<- "×©×œ×•×" # Now let's put "Peace" (in Hebrew) into variable x
>> x
> #[1] "×©×œ×•×"  # it is still correctly preserved
>
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "English")  # let's change the local
> y<- "×©×œ×•×"  # Now let's enter "peace" to variable y
> x ; y  # comparing variables x and y shows that x was changed while y wasn't
>
> #[1] "Ã¹Ã¬Ã¥Ã­"
> #[1] "×©×œ×•×"
>
> # Do we want them to be different?
>
> # Now If we run Sys.setlocale again, we won't see any change in y or x:
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "English")
> x ; y
>
> #[1] "Ã¹Ã¬Ã¥Ã­"
> #[1] "×©×œ×•×"
>
>
> # while if we run it in Hebrew
>   Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "Hebrew")
>   x ; y  # it will change x but not y
> #[1] "×©×œ×•×"
> #[1] "×©×œ×•×"
>
> # and changing this back to English will only change x but not y
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "English")
> x ; y
> #[1] "Ã¹Ã¬Ã¥Ã­"
> #[1] "×©×œ×•×"
>
>
> This leads me to two questions:
> 1) Is this a desired property of  Sys.setlocale (or of the storage system of
> the variables in R) ?
> 2) Is there a function that can change x to be like y?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Tal
>
>
>
>
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili@gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>
>
>
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