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

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Luca Meyer wrote:

> How would I go by doing that? I have tried with:
>
> source("file.R", encoding="it_IT.UTF-8")
>
> But I get
>
> Error in file(file, "r", encoding = encoding) :
>  unsupported conversion from 'it_IT.UTF-8' to ''

Well, that is not the value I suggested -- so what not simply follow 
what you were asked to try?

>
> Thanks,
> Luca
>
> PS:  "it_IT.UTF-8" is what I get under locale when I run sessionInfo()
>
> Il giorno 03/gen/2011, alle ore 09.48, Prof Brian Ripley ha scritto:
>
>> 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
>
>

-- 
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