To continue this discussion with constructive propositions, here is a page that provides useful tracks for using UTF-8 on Windows: http://www.utf8everywhere.org (second half of the page).
On 10 Nov 2013, at 00:58, Ben Bolker <bbol...@gmail.com> wrote: > Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan <at> gmail.com> writes: > >> >> On 13-11-09 12:07 PM, Sverre Stausland wrote: >>> As recently discussed on Stack Overflow, R for Mac OS and Ubuntu (so >>> probably all Unix systems) can correctly write files with UTF-8 >>> encoding, but R for Windows cannot: >> >> That's not an accurate description of the problem. Some functions in R >> convert values to the native encoding, but not all do. >> >>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r >>> >>> I strongly suggest that R for Windows should support this feature in >>> upcoming versions. >> >> It's not trivial to do. When R was written, and perhaps still on some >> obscure platforms, there wasn't any way to do that--Windows didn't >> support UTF-8 then, just Microsoft's version of UCS-2 and a variety of >> other more limited encodings. Unix platforms didn't support UCS-2. So >> internally R keeps many things in the native encoding. >> >> If you decide to rewrite R from scratch now, I'd suggest that you handle >> things differently. If you'd rather not rewrite it yourself, then I >> don't know how you will convince someone else to take on that job. >> >> You might find it easier to convince Microsoft to add a UTF-8 locale, so >> then the native encoding would be UTF-8, and the problem would go away. >> >> Duncan Murdoch I can easily understand this is a huge work… and that R Core Team is not ready to endorse it (now? alone?). However, I am not happy at all to read such kind of sarkastic answer from someone belonging to the R Core Team. This is a serious problem in R under Windows and it would make life a lot more easier to everyone if R could be UTF-8 compliant an *all* supported platforms/OSes. Philippe Grosjean > > Would it be fairer / more productive to say/ask: > > * it would be nice if write.table could write files in UTF-8 encoding > * is there any documentation already available about which R functions > _do_ handle UTF-8 output on Windows, and how they do it? > * could they be used as models for adapting write.table to write files > in UTF-8 encoding on Windows? > > i.e., instead of "convert R to output UTF-8 universally on Windows", > "figure out how to make write.table output UTF-8 on Windows, or > suggest a workaround" ? > > Ben Bolker > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
