[R-SIG-Mac] [R] data frames with å, ä, and ö (=non-ASCII-characters) from windows to mac os x

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, David Winsemius wrote:

> Reading the help page for Sys.get/set/locale:
>
> "Attempts to change the character set (by Sys.setlocale("LC_TYPE", ), if that 
> implies a different character set) during a session may not work and are 
> likely to lead to some confusion.
> Value
> A character string of length one describing the locale in use (after setting 
> for Sys.setlocale), or an empty character string if the current locale 
> settings are invalid or NULL if locale information is unavailable.
> For category = "LC_ALL" the details of the string are system-specific: it 
> might be a single locale name or a set of locale names separated by 
> "/"(Solaris, Mac OS X) or ";" (Windows, Linux). For portability, it is best 
> to query categories individually: it is not necessarily the case that the 
> result of foo <- Sys.getlocale() can be used in Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", 
> locale = foo).'
>
> I interpret that as saying that if you use "LC_ALL", then you need to pass a 
> character string to Sys.setlocale() that is constructed properly for a Mac 
> and that it might have "/"'s.

Actually, it says the opposite: the output you get is not necessarily 
valid input.

> And you need to do it at the beginning of a 
> session. And that it will be ignored, as you say "not do anything" if not 
> precisely correct. This is what Sys.getlocale returns on mine:
>
> "en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8"

However, to set it, just en_US works (Mac locales are by default in 
UTF-8).  In Swedish, you can have:

tystie% locale -a | grep SE
sv_SE
sv_SE.ISO8859-1
sv_SE.ISO8859-15
sv_SE.UTF-8

and setting one of the middle two would have worked.

Annoyingly, Mac OS does not tell you which is which in the locales 
settings list, so it is basically useless.  I believe they are 
alphabetic (in the C locale) order since the Mac only has 6 
categories.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  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