[R] issue with "strange" characters (locale settings)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Oh, please!

This is about the contributed package XML, not R and not Windows.
Some of us have worked very hard to provide reasonable font support in 
R, including on Windows.  We are given exceedingly little credit, just
the brickbats for things for which we are not responsible.  (We even 
work hard to port XML to Windows for you, again with almost zero 
credit.)

That URL is a page in UTF-8, as its header says.  We have provided 
many ways to work with UTF-8 on Windows, but it seems readHTMLTable() 
is not making use of them.

You need to run iconv() on the strings in your object (which as it has 
factors, are the levels).  When you do so, you will discover that page 
contains characters not in your native charset (I presume, not having 
your locale).

What you can do, in Rgui only, is

for (n in names(Islands)) Encoding(levels(Islands[[n]])) <-"UTF-8"

but likely there are still characters it will not know how to display.

On Wed, 4 May 2011, R.T.A.J.Leenders wrote:

>
>   WinXP-x32, R-21.13.0
>   Dear list,
>   I have a problem that (I think) relates to the interaction between Windows
>   and R.
>   I am trying to scrape a table with data on the Hawai'ian Islands, This is my
>   code:
>   library(XML)
>   u <- "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii"
>   tables <- readHTMLTable(u)
>   Islands <- tables[[5]]
>   The output is (first set of columns):
>          Island            Nickname
>                       > Islands
>          Island            Nickname
>                       Location
> 1    Hawai�»i[7]      The Big Island     19�°34′N 155�°30′W / 19.567
> �°N 155.5�°W / 19.567; -155.5
> 2        Maui[8]     The Valley Isle     20�°48′N 156�°20′W / 20.8�°N
> 156.333�°W / 20.8; -156.333
> 3 Kaho�»olawe[9]     The Target Isle       20�°33′N 156�°36′W / 20.55
> �°N 156.6�°W / 20.55; -156.6
> 4   L�na�»i[10]  The Pineapple Isle 20�°50′N 156�°56′W / 20.833�°N 15
> 6.933�°W / 20.833; -156.933
> 5  Moloka�»i[11]   The Friendly Isle 21�°08′N 157�°02′W / 21.133�°N 1
> 57.033�°W / 21.133; -157.033
> 6     O�»ahu[12] The Gathering Place 21�°28′N 157�°59′W / 21.467�°N 1
> 57.983�°W / 21.467; -157.983
> 7    Kaua�»i[13]     The Garden Isle     22�°05′N 159�°30′W / 22.083
> �°N 159.5�°W / 22.083; -159.5
> 8   Ni�»ihau[14]  The Forbidden Isle     21�°54′N 160�°10′W / 21.9�°N
> 160.167�°W / 21.9; -160.167
>
>   As you can see, there are "weird" characters in there. I have also tried
>   readHTMLTable(u,  encoding = "UTF-16") and readHTMLTable(u, encoding =
>   "UTF-8")
>   but that didn't help.
>   It  seems to me that there may be an issue with the interaction of the
>   Windows settings of the character set.
>   sessionInfo() gives
>   > sessionInfo()
>   R version 2.13.0 (2011-04-13)
>   Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)
>   locale:
>   [1] LC_COLLATE=Dutch_Netherlands.1252  LC_CTYPE=Dutch_Netherlands.1252
>   LC_MONETARY=Dutch_Netherlands.1252
>   [4] LC_NUMERIC=C                       LC_TIME=Dutch_Netherlands.1252
>   attached base packages:
>   [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>   other attached packages:
>   [1] XML_3.2-0.2
>   >
>   I  have  also  attempted  to  let  R  use another setting by entering:
>   Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8"), but this yields the response:
>   > Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8")
>   [1] ""
>   Warning message:
>   In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8") :
>     OS reports request to set locale to "en_US.UTF-8" cannot be honored
>   >
>   In addition, I have attempted to make the change directly from the windows
>   command prompt, using: "chcp 65001" and variations of that, but that didn't
>   change anything.
>   I have searched the list and the web and have found others bringing forth a
>   similar issues, but have not been able to find a solution. I looks like this
>   is  an  issue  of how Windows and R interact. Unfortunately, all three
>   computers at my disposal have this problem. It occurs both under WinXP-x32
>   and under Win7-x86.
>   Is there a way to make R override the windows settings or can the issue be
>   solved otherwise?
>   I have also tried other websites, and the issue occurs every time when there
>   is an é, Ì, À, î, et cetera in the text-to-be-scraped.
>   Thank you,
>   Roger
> ______________________________________________
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> 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