[R] How to get the length of an UTF-8 string

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008, Fán Lóng wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I am intending to get the length of an UTF-8 string which contains
> some Japanese characters (let's say, rstr) in R language.
> I try to use the nchar(rstr) to get its length, however, it returns
> the "NA" for it contains some multi-byte characters.
>
> Is there any alternatives to return the length of this rstr?

Use a UTF-8 locale, then nchar() will get it right.

Or convert it to the Japanese locale on your system, and use nchar in that 
locale.

>
> Any suggestion is  appreciated.
>
> Long
>
> ______________________________________________
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Please do: we are missing the 'at a minimum' information needed to answer 
this question.  Locales do matter.


-- 
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)
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