Nobody else has replied to this, so I will. It's very unlikely that we
would incorporate this function into base R. For one thing, the tools
package is intended to be tools used by R, not by users. R doesn't need
this function, so it doesn't belong in tools. (Some other functions in
tools like showNonASCII have come to be used by users, but their primary
purpose is for R.)
Utility functions that are maintained by R Core and are useful to users
belong in the utils package. But I wouldn't add ASCIIfy to that package
either, because I don't want to impose its maintenance on R Core.
Utility functions that are maintained by others belong in contributed
packages. So I'd suggest that you add this function to some package
that you maintain (perhaps a new one, containing a collection of related
utility functions), or search CRAN for an appropriate package with a
maintainer who is willing to take this on.
Duncan Murdoch
On 15/04/2014 1:48 PM, Arni Magnusson wrote:
Hi all,
I would like to propose the attached function ASCIIfy() to be added to the
'tools' package.
Non-ASCII characters in character vectors can be problematic for R
packages, but sometimes they cannot be avoided. To make packages portable
and build without 'R CMD check' warnings, my solution has been to convert
problematic characters in functions and datasets to escaped ASCII, so
plot(1,main="São Paulo") becomes plot(1,main="S\u00e3o Paulo").
The showNonASCII() function in package:tools is helpful to identify R
source files where characters should be converted to ASCII one way or
another, but I could not find a function to actually perform the
conversion to ASCII.
I have written the function ASCIIfy() to convert character vectors to
ASCII. I imagine other R package developers might be looking for a similar
tool, and it seems to me that package:tools is the first place they would
look, where the R Core Team has provided a variety of tools for handling
non-ASCII characters in package development.
I hope the R Core Team will adopt ASCIIfy() into the 'tools' package, to
make life easier for package developers outside the English-speaking
world. I have of course no problem with them renaming or rewriting the
function in any way.
See the attached examples - all in flat ASCII that was prepared using the
function itself! The main objective, though, is to ASCIIfy functions and
datasets, not help pages.
Arni
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