I did read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way 
<http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/faqs/smart-questions.html> and I don't have 
a problem with calling me stupid and/or a winer for posting this...

What's the purpose of an R Mailing list (especially r-help), after all? 
IMHO it should be about R users being able to ask questions and getting 
help from those who would like to provide some. Unless a post has been 
written in an clearly offensive tone and/or shows a major amount of 
ignorance on the part of the person asking, why would you want to not 
just provide an answer to the question posed but deliver on top either 
sarcasm, personal criticism, sharp remarks or the like?

I also believe that it's in the nature of things that R users will most 
likely rather post about problems/bugs they encountered than to simply 
drop a line of acknowledgment for the people who continuously develop R 
and its packages. It's nice if they do explicitly express their 
gratitude in their posts (and this *does* happen a lot also), but it is 
not *demanded* and if they don't, it doesn't automatically mean that 
they are not grateful...

Please understand me right: all the people working on pushing R forward 
do fantastic work and I greatly appreciate the inputs from the entire 
community, I sometimes just wonder about the tone in the mailing lists. 
But that's probably just me , maybe it's just the way the cookie 
crumbles in technical mailing lists ...

Regards,
Janko

On 05.05.2011 11:33, R.T.A.J.Leenders wrote:
>     Thank you. The line of code you give certainly resolves several of the
>     issues.
>     I didn't realize that font support is such a tough matter to realize. Let me
>     express my gratitude to those who provide this for us in R.
>     On 04-05-11, Prof Brian Ripley<ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:
>
>     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<- "[1]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       HawaiУ??У?ТЛi[7]        The   Big   Island       19У??У?ТА34У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     155У??У?ТА30У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП19.567
>     >У??У?ТАN 155.5У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 19.567; -155.5
>     >2           Maui[8]        The    Valley   Isle       20У??У?ТА48У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     156У??У?ТА20У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП20.8У??У?ТАN
>     >156.333У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 20.8; -156.333
>     >3   KahoУ??У?ТЛolawe[9]       The   Target   Isle        20У??У?ТА33У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     156У??У?ТА36У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП20.55
>     >У??У?ТАN 156.6У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 20.55; -156.6
>     >4      LУ??naУ??У?ТЛi[10]     The    Pineapple    Isle    20У??У?ТА50У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     156У??У?ТА56У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП20.833У??У?ТАN 15
>     >6.933У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 20.833; -156.933
>     >5     MolokaУ??У?ТЛi[11]      The    Friendly    Isle    21У??У?ТА08У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     157У??У?ТА02У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП21.133У??У?ТАN 1
>     >57.033У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 21.133; -157.033
>     >6        OУ??У?ТЛahu[12]    The    Gathering    Place    21У??У?ТА28У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     157У??У?ТА59У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП21.467У??У?ТАN 1
>     >57.983У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 21.467; -157.983
>     >7       KauaУ??У?ТЛi[13]       The   Garden   Isle       22У??У?ТА05У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     159У??У?ТА30У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП22.083
>     >У??У?ТАN 159.5У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 22.083; -159.5
>     >8      NiУ??У?ТЛihau[14]    The   Forbidden   Isle       21У??У?ТА54У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     160У??У?ТА10У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП21.9У??У?ТАN
>     >160.167У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 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 У?ТЉ, У?ТМ, У?ТЄ, У?ТЎ, et cetera in the text-to-be-scraped.
>     >   Thank you,
>     >   Roger
>     >______________________________________________
>     >R-help@r-project.org  mailing list
>     >[2]https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>     >PLEASE do read the posting guide
>     [3]http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>     >and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>     >
>     --
>     Brian D. Ripley,ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
>     Professor of Applied Statistics,  [4]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
>
> References

>     1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii
>     2.https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>     3.http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>     4.http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/%7Eripley/
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org  mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Janko Thyson*
janko.thyson@googlemail.com <mailto:janko.thyson@googlemail.com>

Jesuitenstraпe 3
D-85049 Ingolstadt

Mobile: +49 (0)176 83294257

This e-mail and any attachment is for authorized use by the intended
recipient(s) only. It may contain proprietary material, confidential
information and/or be subject to legal privilege. It should not be
copied, disclosed to, retained or used by any other party.
If you are not an intended recipient then please promptly delete this
e-mail and any attachment and all copies and inform the sender.


On 05.05.2011 11:33, R.T.A.J.Leenders wrote:
>     Thank you. The line of code you give certainly resolves several of the
>     issues.
>     I didn't realize that font support is such a tough matter to realize. Let me
>     express my gratitude to those who provide this for us in R.
>     On 04-05-11, Prof Brian Ripley<ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:
>
>     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<- "[1]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       HawaiУ??У?ТЛi[7]        The   Big   Island       19У??У?ТА34У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     155У??У?ТА30У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП19.567
>     >У??У?ТАN 155.5У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 19.567; -155.5
>     >2           Maui[8]        The    Valley   Isle       20У??У?ТА48У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     156У??У?ТА20У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП20.8У??У?ТАN
>     >156.333У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 20.8; -156.333
>     >3   KahoУ??У?ТЛolawe[9]       The   Target   Isle        20У??У?ТА33У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     156У??У?ТА36У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП20.55
>     >У??У?ТАN 156.6У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 20.55; -156.6
>     >4      LУ??naУ??У?ТЛi[10]     The    Pineapple    Isle    20У??У?ТА50У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     156У??У?ТА56У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП20.833У??У?ТАN 15
>     >6.933У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 20.833; -156.933
>     >5     MolokaУ??У?ТЛi[11]      The    Friendly    Isle    21У??У?ТА08У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     157У??У?ТА02У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП21.133У??У?ТАN 1
>     >57.033У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 21.133; -157.033
>     >6        OУ??У?ТЛahu[12]    The    Gathering    Place    21У??У?ТА28У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     157У??У?ТА59У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП21.467У??У?ТАN 1
>     >57.983У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 21.467; -157.983
>     >7       KauaУ??У?ТЛi[13]       The   Garden   Isle       22У??У?ТА05У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     159У??У?ТА30У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП22.083
>     >У??У?ТАN 159.5У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 22.083; -159.5
>     >8      NiУ??У?ТЛihau[14]    The   Forbidden   Isle       21У??У?ТА54У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВN
>     160У??У?ТА10У?ТЂУ?ТЄУ?ТВWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / У?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП21.9У??У?ТАN
>     >160.167У??У?ТАWУ?ТЏУ?ТЛУ?ТП / 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 У?ТЉ, У?ТМ, У?ТЄ, У?ТЎ, et cetera in the text-to-be-scraped.
>     >   Thank you,
>     >   Roger
>     >______________________________________________
>     >R-help@r-project.org  mailing list
>     >[2]https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>     >PLEASE do read the posting guide
>     [3]http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>     >and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>     >
>     --
>     Brian D. Ripley,ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
>     Professor of Applied Statistics,  [4]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
>
> References
>
>     1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii
>     2.https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>     3.http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>     4.http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/%7Eripley/
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org  mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Janko Thyson*
janko.thyson@googlemail.com <mailto:janko.thyson@googlemail.com>

Jesuitenstraпe 3
D-85049 Ingolstadt

Mobile: +49 (0)176 83294257

This e-mail and any attachment is for authorized use by the intended
recipient(s) only. It may contain proprietary material, confidential
information and/or be subject to legal privilege. It should not be
copied, disclosed to, retained or used by any other party.
If you are not an intended recipient then please promptly delete this
e-mail and any attachment and all copies and inform the sender.


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