[R] Umlaut read from csv-file

[Heinz Tuechler]

At 16:52 07.11.2008, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>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.

The cause, why I tried the example below was to 
solve the encoding by dumping and then 
re-sourcing a data.frame with the encoding 
parameter set to latin1. As you can see, 
source(x, encoding='latin1') does not have the 
effect I expected. Unfortunately I do not have 
any idea, what I understood wrong regarding the meaning of encoding='latin1'.

Heinz Tüchler


us <- c("a", "b", "c", "ä", "ö", "ü")
Encoding(us)
[1] "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "latin1"  "latin1"  "latin1"
dump('us', 'us_dump.txt')
rm(us)
source('us_dump.txt', encoding='latin1')
us
[1] "a" "b" "c" "ä" "ö" "ü"
Encoding(us)
[1] "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "unknown"
unlink('us_dump.txt')




>--
>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