[R] Using unicode characters with paste or sprintf

[Mike Toews]

Hi,

I'm having difficulties with Unicode characters with R 2.7.0 on Windows 
XP SP2. I'd like to use a delta character, which I'd also like to mix 
with other formatted output using paste() or sprintf(). On my system, I 
can successfully do this with a static string:

print("\u0394Q = 2.2 L/s")
[1] "ΔQ = 2.2 L/s"

However, when I use paste() or sprintf(), the Unicodeness is lost:

paste("\u0394Q =",round(1.2345,3),"L/s")
[1] "<U+0394>Q = 1.234 L/s"

sprintf("\u0394Q = %.3f L/s",1.2345)
[1] "<U+0394>Q = 1.234 L/s"

Any incite why this happens? Also are there any suggestions or 
workarounds that I can use to produce a formatted string rather than a 
static string?

Thanks in advance.

+mt