[R] Umlaut read from csv-file

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2008, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Heinz Tuechler wrote:
>> Dear Prof.Ripley!
>>
>> Thank you very much for your attention. In the given example Encoding(),
>> or the encoding parameter of read.csv solve the problem. I hope your
>> patch will solve also the problem, when I read a spss file by
>> spss.get(), since this function has no encoding parameter and my real
>> problem originated there.
>
> read.spss() (package foreign) does have a reencode argument, though; and
> this is called by spss.get(), so it looks like an easy hack to add it
> there.

Yes, older software like spss.get needs to get updated for the 
internationalization age.  Modifying it to have a ... argument passed to 
read.spss would be a good idea (and future-proofing).

In cases like this it is likely that the SPSS file does contain its 
encoding (although sometimes it does not and occasionally it is wrong), so 
it is helpful to make use of the info if it is there.  However, the 
default is read.spss(reencode=NA) because of the problems of assuming that 
the info is correct when it is not are worse.

-- 
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