[R-sig-Geo] readOGR and nonASCII character

[Roger Bivand]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Agustin Lobo wrote:

> Roger,
>
> read.shapefile() and read.dbf() yields weird symbols for non-ascii characters 
> in the input file also.
> Exporting to csv and reading in with read.csv(filename,sep=";") works fine 
> (yes, it's odd, excel puts ";" instead of "," for CSV in spanish locale as
> "," could be used for decimal separation)

(See read.csv2())

So a possible work-around is to use CSV or text files to transfer the 
affected character values. There are lots of possible difficulties when 
the data are generated by one program making some assumptions and then 
read by a different program with different assumptions. read.table() and 
friends do have an encoding= argument to assign a known code to character 
strings. There is a short note in the Data Import-Export manual, and much 
more about locales in the installation and administration manual.

Roger


>
> My session.info output is:
>
>>  sessionInfo()
> R version 2.5.0 (2007-04-23)
> i386-pc-mingw32
>
> locale:
> LC_COLLATE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_CTYPE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_MONETARY=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Spanish_Spain.1252
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"     "datasets" "methods" 
> "base"
>
> other attached packages:
>   spatstat       mgcv shapefiles   maptools    foreign      rgdal sp
>  "1.11-7"   "1.3-23"      "0.6"   "0.6-13"   "0.8-20"   "0.5-13" "0.9-14"
>
> Agus
>
> Roger Bivand escribió:
>>  On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Agustin Lobo wrote:
>> 
>> >  Hi list,
>> > 
>> >  Is there any way to get readOGR() to correctly read
>> >  non-ascii character strings from the dbf file? I've
>> >  checked and my dbf file correctly displays
>> >  names with accents, but once read into R
>> >  accents are substituted by wrong symbols.
>>
>>  We are dependent on what GDAL/OGR gives us here. Please try the equivalent
>>  function in maptools for your shapefile, and see whether the read.dbf() in
>>  foreign does any better. I'm assuming that you know the locale settings of
>>  your platform, and of the originating platform from sessionInfo()?
>>
>>  Roger
>> 
>> > 
>> >  Agus
>> > 
>> >
>> 
>
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no