[R-SIG-Mac] Bug in reading UTF-16LE file?

[Simon Urbanek]

From the help page:

     The encodings ‘"UCS-2LE"’ and ‘"UTF-16LE"’ are treated specially,
     as they are appropriate values for Windows ‘Unicode’ text files.
     If the first two bytes are the Byte Order Mark ‘0xFEFF’ then these
     are removed as some implementations of ‘iconv’ do not accept BOMs.

so "UTF-16LE" is the documented way to reliably read such files.

Cheers,
Simon



> On 8 Sep 2024, at 21:23, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> To R-SIG-Mac, with a copy to Jeff Newmiller:
> 
> On R-help there's a thread about reading a remote file that is coded in UTF-16LE with a byte-order mark.  Jeff Newmiller pointed out (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2024-September/479933.html) that it would be better to declare the encoding as "UTF-16", because the BOM will indicate little endian.
> 
> I tried this on my Mac running R 4.4.1, and it didn't work.  I get the same incorrect result from all of these commands:
> 
> # Automatically recognizing a URL and using fileEncoding:
> read.delim(
> 'https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files/ch15/employee.txt',
>     fileEncoding = "UTF-16"
> )
> 
> # Using explicit url() with encoding:
> read.delim(
> url('https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files/ch15/employee.txt',
>        encoding = "UTF-16")
> )
> 
> # Specifying the endianness incorrectly:
> read.delim(
> url('https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files/ch15/employee.txt',
>        encoding = "UTF-16BE")
> )
> 
> The only way I get the correct result is if I specify "UTF-16LE" explicitly, whereas Jeff got correct results on several different systems using "UTF-16".
> 
> Is this a MacOS bug or an R for MacOS bug?
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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