[R] R 1.9.0, special characters in variable names.

[Peter Dalgaard]

"Sixten Borg" <sb at ihe.se> writes:

> Hello all,
> 
> I upgraded from R 1.8.1 to 1.9.0 (Windows XP), and spotted an odd thing.
> 
> The last three letters in the Swedish alphabet are å, ä and ö. (In case they don't show correctly: they are a with a ring, a with two dots, and o with two dots (HTML: &aring;  &auml; &ouml;).
> 
> When I use these as variable names in a data.frame, odd things happen:
> In R 1.8.1, å (&aring;) doesn't work while the others do.
> In R 1.9.0, ö (&ouml;) doesn't work while the others do.
> 
> Please find examples below. It would be nice if all three could be used in variable names. At least in Sweden :-)

I suspect this is an OS/locale issue rather than an R one -- we're at
the mercy of whatever the isprint function/macro returns for a given
locale. Works fine on Linux with LC_CTYPE=da_DK

> > data.frame(a=1, å=2, ä=3, ö=4)
>   a å ä X.
> 1 1 2 3  4

> data.frame(a=1, å=2, ä=3, ö=4, æ=5, ø=6)
  a å ä ö æ ø
1 1 2 3 4 5 6

(1.9.0 on RH8)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
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