[R] cannot read iso639 table

[William Dunlap]

It would be helpful if you showed your commands and printed
outputs, copied directly from your R session, from the beginning
to the end.  I put the call to sessionInfo() in my message because
it is probably relevant.  It is nice to completely include the original
email when responding to it so others can see the whole story in
one place.

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Steingold [mailto:sam.steingold at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Sam Steingold
> Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 1:18 PM
> To: William Dunlap
> Cc: peter dalgaard; r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] cannot read iso639 table
> 
> > * William Dunlap <jqhaync at gvopb.pbz> [2012-09-13 19:50:21 +0000]:
> >
> > On Windows with R-2.15.1 in a 1252 locale, I had to read (and toss) out
> > the initial 3 bytes (the byte-order mark?) to make things work:
> >
> >   > socket <-
> >   > url("http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/ISO-639-2_utf-
> 8.txt",open="r",encoding="utf-8")
> >   > readChar(socket, nchars=3, useBytes=TRUE)
> >   [1] ""
> 
> confirmed - first 3 bytes are "\357\273\277"
> 
> >   > d <- read.table(socket, quote="", sep="|", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
> >   > dim(d)
> >   [1] 485   5
> >   > head(d)
> >      V1 V2 V3             V4      V5
> >   1 aar    aa           Afar    afar
> >   2 abk    ab      Abkhazian abkhaze
> >   3 ace             Achinese    aceh
> >   4 ach                Acoli   acoli
> >   5 ada              Adangme adangme
> >   6 ady       Adyghe; Adygei  adyghé
> 
> alas, this is all I get:
> 
> Warning message:
> In scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>   invalid input found on input connection 'http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/ISO-
> 639-2_utf-8.txt'
> 
>   a3bibliographic a3terminologic a2        english  french
> 1             aar             NA aa           Afar    afar
> 2             abk             NA ab      Abkhazian abkhaze
> 3             ace             NA          Achinese    aceh
> 4             ach             NA             Acoli   acoli
> 5             ada             NA           Adangme adangme
> 6             ady             NA    Adyghe; Adygei   adygh
> 
> note that the first non-ASCII character terminates the input.
> 
> so, I still cannot read the data from the URL.
> 
> I can read the file though - with quote="" (thanks Peter!) -
> except that the first record is "\357\273\277aar".
> 
> 
> --
> Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) X 11.0.11103000
> http://www.childpsy.net/ http://thereligionofpeace.com
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