[R] error in calling source(): invalid multibyte character in parser

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2011, peter dalgaard wrote:

>
> On Jan 3, 2011, at 08:32 , Luca Meyer wrote:
>
>> Being italians when writing comments/instructions we use accented letters - like à, ò, è, etc.... when running R scripts using such characters I get and error saying:
>>
>> invalid multibyte character in parser
>>
>> I have been looking at the help and searched the r-help archives but I haven't find anything that I could intelligibly apply to my case.
>>
>> Can anyone suggest a fix for this error?
>
> The most likely cause is that your scripts are written in an "8 bit 
> ASCII" encoding (Latin-1 or -9, most likely), while R is running in 
> a UTF8 locale. If that is the cause, the fix is to standardize 
> things to use the same locale. You can convert the encoding of your 
> source file using the iconv utility (in a Terminal window).

Or use the 'encoding' argument of source() to tell R what the encoding 
is, e.g. encoding="latin1" or "latin-9" (the inconsistency being in 
the iconv used on Macs, not in R).

>
> -pd
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Luca
>>
>> Mr. Luca Meyer
>> www.lucameyer.com
>> IBM SPSS Statistics release 19.0.0
>> R version 2.12.1 (2010-12-16)
>> Mac OS X 10.6.5 (10H574) - kernel Darwin 10.5.0
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> 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.
>
> -- 
> Peter Dalgaard
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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