[R] Encoding problems.

[Peter Dalgaard]

Gérald Jean wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I use:
> 
> R version 2.9.2 (2009-08-24)
> Copyright (C) 2009 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
> ISBN 3-900051-07-0
> 
> on Ubuntu 9.10, I usually run R from ESS (5.4 on current Unbuntu) from
> Emacs-22.2.1.  But I also tried the following from the console and it
> gave the same results.
> 
> I have a data file containing lots of European characters, French,
> German, Italian and so on.  I can read it ok in R but I can't display
> the characters correctly.
> 
> I searched the archives and following professor Ripley's advice I read
> my data the following way:
> 
>> con <- file("/home/gerald/Vins/ListeVin091123.csv", open = "r",
> encoding = "UTF-8")
>> isOpen(con)
> [1] TRUE
>> ttt <- read.table(file = con, header = TRUE, sep = ";", quote = "\"'",
> +                 dec = ",",   # row.names, col.names,
> +                 na.strings = "", colClasses = NA, nrows = -1,
> +                 skip = 0, check.names = TRUE,
> +                 strip.white = FALSE, blank.lines.skip = TRUE,
> +                 comment.char = "#",
> +                 allowEscapes = FALSE, flush = FALSE,
> +                 stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
>> close(con)
> 
> It seems that R does recognize the locales since it tries to report
> errors in French here is a simple example:
> 
>> ttt.g <- "gérald"
> Erreur : caractères multioctets incorrects dans l'analyse de code
> (parser) Ã  la ligne 1

Looks like R is speaking UTF-8 and you're not. Or rather, your console
isn't. You may need to poke around to change that -- I think most
terminal emulators these days allow you to set the encoding from their
menu bar.

However, the printout below doesn't quite look like UTF-8, more like one
of the older ISO646 mechanisms, so you may still have some work to do.
Then again, if OO can read the original file, maybe I am worrying too
soon....

-p

> outputting the colnames of my data set I get:
> 
>> names(ttt)
>  [1] "ID"           "Domaine"      "Nom"          "MillÃÂ.sime"
> "Pays"        
>  [6] "RÃÂ.gion"    "Appellation"  "Vignoble"     "Couleur"
> "Alcool"      
> [11] "Classement"   "Cuve"         "mois"         "Bio"
> "CÃÂ.page..1"
> [16] "X."           "CÃÂ.page..2" "X..1"         "CÃÂ.page..3"
> "X..2"        
> [21] "CÃÂ.page..4" "X..3"         "CÃÂ.page..5" "X..4"
> "Prix"        
> [26] "QuantitÃÂ."  "Internet"    
> 
> sessionInfo yields the following:
> 
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.9.2 (2009-08-24) 
> i486-pc-linux-gnu 
> 
> locale:
> LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=fr_CA.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=fr_CA.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=C;
> LC_MESSAGES=fr_CA.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=fr_CA.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;
> LC_MEASUREMENT=fr_CA.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
> base     
> 
> other attached packages:
> [1] Revobase_0.2-1
> 
> I tried to play with Emacs' coding systems with no luck!  Any idea on
> how to handle this?
> 
> My ultimate goal is to clean up and sort this data set and then export
> it in a LaTeX compatible format.
> 
> By the way, if I open the file with OpenOffice Calc it asks me to
> confirm that the encoding is Unicode UTF-8, I do, change the default
> delimiter to ";" and press enter.  All the accented characters display
> OK.
> 
> Thanks for any insights,
> 
> Gérald Jean
> 
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-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)              FAX: (+45) 35327907