[R-pkg-devel] UTF-8 characters inside R functions for data transformation

[Simon Urbanek]

Xavier,

short answer is no, because there is no guarantee that user's system supports any encoding other than ASCII, so that code wouldn't run. Hence you can't use non-ASCII characters in symbols.

That said, you can use Unicode _strings_, so metadata[["\u00e1cc\u00e9nts"]] will work in ASCII-locale, but I would strongly caution against such objects in public packages.

Cheers,
Simon


> On Dec 22, 2021, at 9:18 AM, X FiM <xfim.ll using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Somewhat related to a question that I posted a while ago (see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2021q4/007540.html), once
> I've got a dataframe in my cache, some of the functions need to use some of
> the variables. It turns out that some of the columns contain UTF-8
> characters, and therefore I need to be able to call
> `metadata$variable.with.áccénts`.
> 
> But the package development checks warn me that no non-ASCII characters are
> allowed in the files "checking R files for non-ASCII characters ...
> WARNING".
> 
> I have specified that the package uses UTF-8 in DESCRIPTION ("Encoding:
> UTF-8"). I have also defined "options(encoding = "UTF-8")" before calling
> the checks, but nothing seems to matter. I have also tried to give the
> proper UTF-8 codes, like in `metadata$variable.with.\u00e1cc\u00e9nts`, but
> with no luck either. Also it gives an error with "\uxxxx sequences not
> supported inside backticks".
> 
> So which approach do you recommend? Is there any solution that I can use to
> call variables that use non-ASCII characters?
> 
> Thank you very much.
> 
> -- 
> Xavier
> 
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