[R-sig-Geo] readOGR and nonASCII character

[Agustin Lobo]

This is what I do as a work-around:

ActiG <- 
readOGR("C:/ALOBO/dipu2006/espaisoberts_P037/GARRAF/GFO_EOA_TOTS_v4",layer="GFO_EOA_Acti_v4")
delme2 <- 
read.csv("C:/ALOBO/dipu2006/espaisoberts_P037/GARRAF/GFO_EOA_TOTS_v4/GFO_EOA_Acti_v4.csv",sep=";") 

ActiG at data$NOM_FINCA <- delme2$NOM_FINCA

but wanted to highlight the problem of non ascii characters. Also,
note that writeOGR works fine. After this, the dbf written by

writeOGR(pepa,layer="ActiG",driver="ESRI 
Shapefile",dsn="C:/ALOBO/dipu2006/espaisoberts_P037/GARRAF/GFO_EOA_TOTS_v4")

has accents, ç, and all the catalan subtleties!

Thanks for your patience

Agus


Roger Bivand escribió:
> 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
>>> > >
>>>
>>
>>
> 

-- 
Dr. Agustin Lobo
Institut de Ciencies de la Terra "Jaume Almera" (CSIC)
LLuis Sole Sabaris s/n
08028 Barcelona
Spain
Tel. 34 934095410
Fax. 34 934110012
email: Agustin.Lobo at ija.csic.es
http://www.ija.csic.es/gt/obster