[R-SIG-Mac] Unicode characters in script?

[Simon Urbanek]

On Aug 11, 2011, at 2:35 PM, Michael Hoban wrote:

> Hi all-
> 
> I tried searching before posting, but this is one of those tricky
> questions to search for. My issue is this: within the R.app gui, I can
> use extended characters in plot labels without any issue (specifically
> in my case the ∂, lowercase delta), for example:
> 
>> plot(c(1:10) ~ c(1:10), main="∂foobie bletchƒ")
> 
> However, when I try to do the same in a script from the terminal
> (interpreted by Rscript), I get a bunch of errors related to character
> encoding:
>  ....
>  conversion failure on '∂foobie bletchƒ' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot
> substituted for <e2>
>  ....
> 
> Is there a way to make this work? Or is Rscript not equipped to handle
> multibyte characters?
> 

It seems your'e running Rscript in a locale that doesn't support unicode (probably C). Make sure you use UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.UTF-8)

Cheers,
Simon