[R] issue with encoding in R-2.8.1 invalid multibyte character

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> Well, we don't see what you see. but if ? was hex a7, the message is 
>> entirely correct.  If you want to enter that, use "\xa7".
>
> We see different things.

Right, and my point is that we do not know what he actually sees.

> I see  a section sign (double s) symbol. From the 
> symptoms, I would suspect that the terminal is set to latin-1 or -15 (both 
> have the section sign at 0xa7) even though the system (and thus R) is utf-8.

I thought of that, but if the system is in UTF-8, so would its keyboard 
be.  Perhaps this is a remote session from a Windows system to a UTF-8 
one? (In which case set the remote locale appropriately.)

The issue seemed to be about entering Latin characters (-1 or -9, I think: 
latin-9 is ISO 8859-15), and that is what I tried to answer.

-- 
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