[R] Transferring a dataset from WINXP to Mac - problems with umlauts

[Frank Bloos]

Dear R-Help,

is it possible to correctly display umlauts in a dataset, which has been created under WINXP, on a Mac-system?

This is the problem:
I have imported a German MS-Access database into R 2.14.1 by using RODBC on a WINXP-System. It runs with a Latin-1 encoding (codepage 1252). However, most of the work is done with a Mac (UTF-8 encoding) and the R-dataset has been transferred to the MAC.  Here, umlauts are displayed as \x.. (i.e. \xe4 instead of ä). If I set the locale to Sys.setlocale(locale="de_DE.ISO8859-15"), umlauts are displayed as black diamonds. 

Since it is awkward to enter \x-codes when I work with the dataset, I would rather use the umlauts. Is there a way?

Thanks, FB