[R] substitute accents

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Can you please tell us what locale you are working in?

This looks as if the problem might be the use of a UTF-8 locale, which R 
does not currently support and which some Linux distros have made their 
default.  However, R does issue a warning -- so did you get one?

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Manuel Gutierrez wrote:

> I have an openoffice spreadsheet with a column of
> character strings.
> Some of them contain accents.
> I want to read it in R so I have saved it as a csv
> file using Western Europe (ISO-8859-1) character set
> (the default, I've tried other sets but it doesn't
> help).
> R reads it fine with
>
> CharMatrix<-read.csv("test.csv",header=F,sep=",",as.is=TRUE);
> Say I wan't to replace the 'o' with accent in the
> first cell.
> I've tried:
> gsub('ó','o', CharMatrix[1,1])
> But, It doesn't make any substitution
> Trying to find a solution I input the character string
> in R and do the substitution:
> CharMatrix[1,1]<-"hóla"
> gsub('ó','o', CharMatrix[1,1])
> And it works. I think the difference is that when I
> now print the content of CharMatrix I get a \201
> before the ó while I didn't get it with the openoffice
> imported csv file.
> I'm sure it is a problem with my understanding of how
> accents can be specified. Can someone give me any
> solutions / references?
> Thanks,
> M
>
>         _
> platform i686-pc-linux-gnu
> arch     i686
> os       linux-gnu
> system   i686, linux-gnu
> status
> major    2
> minor    0.0
> year     2004
> month    10
> day      04
> language R
>
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595