Dear R-users, I have a file containing names of German students. These names contain the characters "ä", "ö" or "ü" (German umlauts). I use read.table() to read the file and let's assume the table is then stored in a variable called "data". The names are then contained in the first column, i.e. data[,1]. Now if I simply display the variable "data", I see, that "ä" is replaced by \x8a, "ö" is replaced by \x9a and so forth. Now, I would like to have these characters replaced by their LaTeX (or TeX) equivalents, meaning \x8a should be replaced by \"a, \x9a should be replaced by \"o and so forth. I tried a lot, especially with gsub(), however, the backslashes cause problems and I do not know how to get this to work. The data.frame should then be written to a file without destroying the replaced substrings (so that indeed \"a appears in the file for \x8a). Is this possible?
Here is a minimal example: data=data.frame(names=c("Bj\x9arn","S\x9aren"),points=c (10,20),stringsAsFactors=F) data[1,1]=gsub('\\x9a','\\"o',data[1,1]) #does not work! (neither do similar calls) Thanks in advance Marius ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.