We have no idea what you understood (you didn't tell us), but the help
says
encoding: character vector. The encoding(s) to be assumed when 'file'
is a character string: see 'file'. A possible value is
'"unknown"': see the ‘Details’.
...
This paragraph applies if 'file' is a filename (rather than a
connection). If 'encoding = "unknown"', an attempt is made to
guess the encoding. The result of 'localeToCharset()' is used as
a guide. If 'encoding' has two or more elements, they are tried
in turn until the file/URL can be read without error in the trial
encoding.
So source(encoding="latin1") says the file is encoded in Latin-1 and
should be re-encoded if necessary (e.g. in UTF-8 locale).
Setting the Encoding of parsed character strings is not mentioned.
You could have written out a data frame with write.csv() and re-read it
with read.csv(encoding = "latin1"): that was the workaround you were given
earlier (not to use source).
On Sat, 8 Nov 2008, Heinz Tuechler wrote:
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
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
--
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.
