At 16:52 07.11.2008, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
On Fri, 7 Nov 2008, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
Heinz Tuechler wrote:
Dear Prof.Ripley!
Thank you very much for your attention. In the given example Encoding(),
or the encoding parameter of read.csv solve the problem. I hope your
patch will solve also the problem, when I read a spss file by
spss.get(), since this function has no encoding parameter and my real
problem originated there.
read.spss() (package foreign) does have a reencode argument, though; and
this is called by spss.get(), so it looks like an easy hack to add it
there.
Yes, older software like spss.get needs to get
updated for the internationalization
age. Modifying it to have a ... argument passed
to read.spss would be a good idea (and future-proofing).
In cases like this it is likely that the SPSS
file does contain its encoding (although
sometimes it does not and occasionally it is
wrong), so it is helpful to make use of the info
if it is there. However, the default is
read.spss(reencode=NA) because of the problems
of assuming that the info is correct when it is not are worse.
The cause, why I tried the example below was to
solve the encoding by dumping and then
re-sourcing a data.frame with the encoding
parameter set to latin1. As you can see,
source(x, encoding='latin1') does not have the
effect I expected. Unfortunately I do not have
any idea, what I understood wrong regarding the meaning of encoding='latin1'.
Heinz Tüchler
us <- c("a", "b", "c", "ä", "ö", "ü")
Encoding(us)
[1] "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "latin1" "latin1" "latin1"
dump('us', 'us_dump.txt')
rm(us)
source('us_dump.txt', encoding='latin1')
us
[1] "a" "b" "c" "ä" "ö" "ü"
Encoding(us)
[1] "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "unknown" "unknown"
unlink('us_dump.txt')
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
______________________________________________
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.
