[R] Export Unicode characters from R

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 15/07/2011 1:42 PM, Sverre Stausland wrote:
> >>>
> >>>  >    funny.g<- "\u1E21"
> >>>  >    funny.g
> >>
> >>  [1] "ḡ"
> >>
> >>>  >    data.frame (funny.g) ->    funny.g
> >>>  >    funny.g$funny.g
> >>
> >>  [1] ḡ
> >>  Levels:<U+1E21>
> >
> >  I think the problem is in the data.frame code, not in writing. Data.frames
> >  try to display things in a readable way, and since you're on Windows where
> >  UTF-8 is not really supported, the code helpfully changes that character to
> >  the "<U+1E21>" string. for display.
>
> I thought the data.frame function didn't alter the unicode coding,
> since funny.g$funny.g above still displays the right unicode character
> (although it does list the levels as<U+1E21>).
>
> >  You should be able to write the Unicode character to file if you use lower
> >  level methods such as cat(), on a connection opened using the file()
> >  function with the encoding set explicitly.
>
> I'm sorry, but I don't understand what it means "to use cat() on a
> connection opened using the file() function". Could you please clarify
> that?

Sorry, I think my suggestion was wrong.  What I meant was something like

file <- file("your filename", encoding="UTF-8")
cat("\u1E21", file= file)

but this doesn't appear to work.

Duncan Murdoch