[R] UTF-8 or Unicode on Windows PC

[Hans-Joerg Bibiko]

On 21 Apr 2008, at 12:33, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

>> Is it possible to download a compiled snapshot of 2.7.0 for Windows  
>> XP?
>
> Yes, http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rtest.html
> And it is due for release tomorrow.

Many thanks! I can see the progress :)

But please forgive my incompetence. I'm not so familiar with Windows.
If I start e.g. RGUI by using: Rgui.exe LC_CTYPE=ja I can type  
Japanese, Russian, and German. strsplit works perfectly! ;)
But if I type for instance a German umlaut 'ü' it comes out as 'u'.  
OK, it is due to the fact I didn't set up Rgui in UTF-8 mode.
But how can I do this? My data are written in many different  
languages, and I want to do some statistics.

R version 2.7.0 RC (2008-04-19 r45391)
i386-pc-mingw32

locales:
all to German_Germany.1252
LC_CTYPE=Japanese_Japan.932

###

There are some minor issues.
I set Rgui's font to "Arial Unicode". This works but I have some  
troubles to place my cursor, caused by the issue that Arial Unicode is  
not a monospaced font.

If I start up Rgui in German, I can see the localized menu items, but  
for each non-ASCII character I see cryptic things. It seems to me that  
the localized strings are written in UTF-8, and Rgui expects ANSI  
characters.

###
Nevertheless, thanks a lot!

--Hans