On 4/10/19 1:14 PM, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 12:19 PM Tomáš Bořil <bor...@gmail.com> wrote:
Minimalistic example:
Let's type "ř" (LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH CARON) in RGui console:
"ř"
[1] "r"
Although the script is in UTF-8, the characters are replaced by
"simplified" substitutes uncontrollably (depending on OS locale). The
same goes with simply entering the code statements in R Console.
The problem does not occur on OS with UTF-8 locale (Mac OS, Linux...)
I think this is a "feature" of win_iconv that is bundled with base R
on Windows (./src/extra/win_iconv). The character from your example is
not part of the latin1 (iso-8859-1) set, however, win-iconv seems to
do so anyway:
x <- "\U00159"
print(x)
[1] "ř"
iconv(x, 'UTF-8', 'iso-8859-1')
[1] "r"
On MacOS, iconv tells us this character cannot be represented as latin1:
x <- "\U00159"
print(x)
[1] "ř"
iconv(x, 'UTF-8', 'iso-8859-1')
[1] NA
I'm actually not sure why base-R needs win_iconv (but I'm not an
encoding expert at all). Perhaps we could try to unbundle it and use
the standard libiconv provided by the Rtools toolchain bundle to get
more consistent results.
win_iconv just calls into Windows API to do the conversion, it is
technically easy to disable the "best fit" conversion, but I think it
won't be a good idea. In some cases, perhaps rare, the best fit is good,
actually including the conversion from "ř" to "r" which makes perfect
sense. But more importantly, changing the behavior could affect users
who expect the substitution to happen because it has been happening for
many years, and it won't help others much.
Tomas
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