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

[Wijffels, Jan]

Yes, it was the section sign (double s) symbol that I was trying to
print connecting from a Windows machine with Latin1 encoding to a UTF-8
Linux machine.
I changed the translation behaviour in my Putty SSH from Latin1 to UTF-8
and now the interactive R programming works.
My scripts which I run with Rscript my_script.r contain quite some
Latin-1 characters. These ran ok in R2.7.0 but not any more in R2.8.1
but I presume this is because in 2.7.1 the changes made to the system
indicated 'The parser sometimes accepted invalid quoted strings in a
UTF-8 locale'. 
So this means for me I need to change the scripts I develop in Latin1 on
Windows to UTF-8 before I upload them to our server.
Thanks for the help.

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] 
Verzonden: woensdag 31 december 2008 9:22
Aan: Peter Dalgaard
CC: Wijffels, Jan; r-help at r-project.org
Onderwerp: Re: [R] issue with encoding in R-2.8.1 invalid multibyte
character

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