Dear mac & R users, Returning to this issue, I and Antti found out this certain problem with R.app and Scandinavian characters was triggered by the Mac OS X's system-wide language locale set to "C" (POSIX) in the OS X installation phase.
(details follow) On June 22, 2006 at 19:43, Antti Arppe wrote: Dear colleagues, > > With the help of a colleague of mine here in Helsinki (Seppo Nyrkkö) > who looked at the innards of the R source code for Mac it turned out > that this was in the end indeed an issue concerning the Mac locale and > its settings and not R. > > Though we had tried this earlier by changing the LANG variable to > 'fi_FI', we hadn't looked hard enough in the available encodings (with > locale -a) to select the exactly correct value, being: > > LANG=fi_FI.IS08859-1; export LANG; > > With this configuration R was able to happily read in my original > table with the Scandinavian characters in the header, without no fuss. > > Thanks for your advice, and wishing all a good Midsummer, > > -Antti Arppe > At the startup, R checks whether it is running in an international character set locale or not. The locale information is inherited from the parent process, i.e. the os x window server, which reads locale settings from the system-wide settings. This information describes which characters are printable, and which should be displayed as substituted characters during the whole R session. The POSIX C locale allows only displaying 7-bit ASCII characters, and disables any printing of the scandinavian characters (ä,ö,å) in R.app. First step of recovery is to change the system from the C locale to an international locale which allows utf-8 character sequences (can be done through System Preferences). This enables proper output of unicode characters in the R.app terminal. Then, to read and write files in the latin-1 (iso-8859-1) character set (note that the system does utf-8 by default now), one should change the default encoding for file operations by commanding 'options(encoding="iso-8859-1")' at the command prompt. It is also possible to add this setting in the startup file ".Rprofile" in the project startup directory. Changing the locale in the command-line shell session (either by hand or in the shell profile script) might not be the best solution here, since other locale-aware OS X applications, launched from the window manager, would remain in the C locale. with best regards, Seppo _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
