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
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