[R-SIG-Mac] R for Mac OS X Aqua GUI and utf-8

[Simon Urbanek]

Hi Joerg,

On Dec 20, 2004, at 9:12 AM, joerg van den hoff wrote:

> I have noticed some mails concerning this in the archive, so I 
> understand this has been already discussed and I understand that the R 
> gui seems to use utf-8 internally.
> I did _not_ find out how to procede, if I the only thing I want is to 
> obtain 'R command line version behaviour' with encoding set to 
> something like latin1. i.e. I would be  glad if I would be able to get 
> things like a german 'umlaut' into string constants (and then into 
> plots).
>
> is there such a way?

Currently, no. The problem is quite complex, because just using Latin1 
for the console (i.e. convert everything going into R to Latin1 and do 
so for R output too) does break anything where R passes strings to the 
OS - like file and directory names. I could add an option that switches 
such behavior on, but then the user has to be careful about using 
non-ASCII characters in filenames/paths.

I'll investigate another path though - we should be able to fix the 
plot thing reasonably easily, because it's Cocoa so handling UTF-8 is 
no issue. About the string output - I'll have to see if there is a way 
to convert strings on-the-fly when printing - in theory it should be 
possible, I'll check it out.

Cheers,
Simon