[R-SIG-Mac] Error on forcing change to utf-8 locale on R.app

[Simon Urbanek]

On Feb 10, 2010, at 7:15 AM, Prashanth NS wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I am a new mac user and an inexperienced R user, now using the latter on the
> former!
> 
> On running the R.app on my Macbook Pro with OS X Snowleopard, warnings about
> non UTF-8 locale showed up.
> 
>> You're using a non-UTF8 locale, therefore only ASCII characters will work.
>> Please read R for Mac OS X FAQ (see Help) section 9 and adjust your system
> preferences accordingly.
> 
> As per the R for Mac OS X FAQ as well as this (
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2008-October/005395.html) post, I
> ran the following in the app.
> 
>> defaults write org.R-project.R force.LANG en_US.UTF-8
>> Error: unexpected symbol in "defaults write"
> 
> Could somebody help with this?
> 

You're supposed to paste that in the shell (Applications -> Utilities - Terminal) not in R.

In R you have to change that to
system("defaults write org.R-project.R force.LANG en_US.UTF-8")

Cheers,
Simon