[R] Umlaut read from csv-file

[Prof Brian Ripley]

We have no idea what you understood (you didn't tell us), but the help 
says

encoding: character vector.  The encoding(s) to be assumed when 'file'
           is a character string: see 'file'.  A possible value is
           '"unknown"': see the ‘Details’.

...
      This paragraph applies if 'file' is a filename (rather than a
      connection).  If 'encoding = "unknown"', an attempt is made to
      guess the encoding.  The result of 'localeToCharset()' is used as
      a guide.  If 'encoding' has two or more elements, they are tried
      in turn until the file/URL can be read without error in the trial
      encoding.

So source(encoding="latin1") says the file is encoded in Latin-1 and 
should be re-encoded if necessary (e.g. in  UTF-8 locale).

Setting the Encoding of parsed character strings is not mentioned.

You could have written out a data frame with write.csv() and re-read it 
with read.csv(encoding = "latin1"): that was the workaround you were given 
earlier (not to use source).

On Sat, 8 Nov 2008, Heinz Tuechler wrote:

> 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
>
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>

-- 
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