[R] Umlaut read from csv-file

[Heinz Tuechler]

At 08:01 08.11.2008, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>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).

Thank you for this explanation. I felt that I did 
not understand the help page of source() and I 
hoped, encoding='latin1' would have the same 
effect as in read.csv(), but rethinking it, I see 
that it would conflict with the primary functionality of source().
Earlier I tried writing the data.frame with 
write.csv and re-reading it. This works, but 
additional information like labels(), I have to tranfer in a second step.
The best way I could immagine, would be some 
function, which marks every character string in 
the whole structure of a data.frame, including all attributes, as latin1.

>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
>>
>>______________________________________________
>>R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>--
>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