[R] Please guide -- UTF-8 locale setting fails on Windows on writing

[Sunny Singha]

Milan,
Ok, Let me take a case of facebook. I used Rfacebook package
 to get posts (getPost()) which returns list() of data frames(post,
comments, Likes)

let me demonstrate 2 cases of read and write just as you suggested,
Case 1:::::::::
Lets say one of the facebook comment has below string value, in
Japanese language-->
"世界餐福事工 - 餐廳員工沒精打采 老是打盤子"

On R console I now assign above string to variableas: x <- "世界餐福事工 -
餐廳員工沒精打采 老是打盤子"
and write it as below:
write.csv(x, file='x.csv', row.names=F, fileEncoding='UTF-8')
I get this string in the file
""<U+4E16><U+754C><U+9910><U+798F><U+4E8B><U+5DE5> -
<U+9910><U+5EF3><U+54E1><U+5DE5><U+6C92><U+7CBE><U+6253><U+91C7> "

Case 2::::::::::::::
I create a notepad 'x.txt' and save Japanese string "世界餐福事工 - 餐廳員工沒精打采 老是打盤子"
and read it as below:
read.table('x.txt', fileEncoding='UTF-8'), I get below output:

  V1
1  ?
Warning messages:
1: In read.table("x.txt", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") :
  invalid input found on input connection 'x.txt'
2: In read.table("x.txt", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") :
  incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'x.txt'

Above was for demonstration, I'm infact reading social media data
extracted, which ultimately is somewhere using httr package and
returning data frames.
I'm not sure how should I get it handled in Windows as I don't observe
this behavior in Mac where system locase is set to 'en_US.UTF-8'

Regards,
Sunny




On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 7:39 PM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan at club.fr> wrote:
> Le lundi 28 mars 2016 à 19:16 +0530, Sunny Singha a écrit :
>> Hi,
>> I think I'm experiencing an issue regarding system Locale. I have
>> exported '.csv' formatted data frames gathered from various social
>> media platforms like facebook/twitter/G+, etc.
>>
>> I observe many variable/columns consists of strings formatted similar to below:
>> "
>> "
>>
>> As expected and I confirmed, in social media data, they are strings in
>> different languages.
>> Platform details are provide in the end of this mail. OS locale is set
>> to English (United States) hence 'R' locale is 'English_United
>> States.1252'
>>
>> I have attempted to change it to UTF-8 but receives below warning message:
>>
>> Warning message:
>> In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "UTF-8") :
>>   OS reports request to set locale to "UTF-8" cannot be honored
> You don't need to set the locale. Just pass an appropriate value (e.g.
> "UTF-8") to read.csv() or write.csv()'s fileEncoding argument.
>
> You also didn't tell us what program you used to read these files. Some
> might guess the encoding incorrectly, or require you to choose it
> manually.
>
>
> Regards
>
>> I have gone through below forums but no resolution so far:
>> --- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20571147/how-to-set-unicode-locale-in-r
>> --- https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067940.html
>> --- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r
>> --- https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
>> --- http://withr.me/configure-character-encoding-for-r-under-linux-and-windows/
>>
>> I'm not sure whether the issue is while reading/extracting the data
>> from media or while writing/exporting in Windows directory, but I
>> don't experience similar issue in my personal Mac machine. I need some
>> clarification here.
>>
>> How could I export the data just as I see on web ?  Please guide.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Sunny
>>
>> Platform I'm using::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
>> Operating System : Windows 7 Professional SP1
>> R version details:
>> platform       x86_64-w64-mingw32
>> arch           x86_64
>> os             mingw32
>> system         x86_64, mingw32
>> status
>> major          3
>> minor          2.3
>> year           2015
>> month          12
>> day            10
>> svn rev        69752
>> language       R
>> version.string R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
>> nickname       Wooden Christmas-Tree
>>
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>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.