[R] Multibyte characters in (row) names

[David Winsemius]

On Aug 2, 2010, at 12:56 PM, Richard R. Liu wrote:

> I have an array with names which contain multibyte characters.  When  
> I try to
> write the array to a file using write.table and row.names = T I  
> receive an error
> message when the first such name is encountered, saying that I have  
> not
> specified the option to generate NA instead.  I really would be  
> satisfied if the
> row name in the file were exactly what is displayed when I print the  
> array on
> the console, e.g., "en.\xc2".  The only way I have found to avoid  
> this is create
> a new array containing in one column a deparse of the original row  
> name and in
> the other the value.  This "solution" is ugly; "en.\xc2" becomes  
> "\"en.\\xc2\"".
>

> Is there a more straight forward way of dealing with multibyte  
> characters?

Do you want to provide a worked example that produces the error? I am  
not getting such an error

 > mtx <-  matrix(1, nrow=1)
 > rownames(mtx) <- "en.\xc2"
 > mtx
         [,1]
en.\xc2    1
 > write.table(mtx, file="test.txt")

What I see in that file is

"V1"
"en.¬" 1

(The character following the period is a logical negation symbol (or  
an IBM keyboard carriage return) on my display.)
-- 
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT