Hi Arni, I’ll be glad to drop ASCIIfy into gtools. Let me know if this OK.
-Greg On Apr 17, 2014, at 9:46 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > Nobody else has replied to this, so I will. It's very unlikely that we would > incorporate this function into base R. For one thing, the tools package is > intended to be tools used by R, not by users. R doesn't need this function, > so it doesn't belong in tools. (Some other functions in tools like > showNonASCII have come to be used by users, but their primary purpose is for > R.) > > Utility functions that are maintained by R Core and are useful to users > belong in the utils package. But I wouldn't add ASCIIfy to that package > either, because I don't want to impose its maintenance on R Core. > > Utility functions that are maintained by others belong in contributed > packages. So I'd suggest that you add this function to some package that you > maintain (perhaps a new one, containing a collection of related utility > functions), or search CRAN for an appropriate package with a maintainer who > is willing to take this on. > > Duncan Murdoch > > On 15/04/2014 1:48 PM, Arni Magnusson wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I would like to propose the attached function ASCIIfy() to be added to the >> 'tools' package. >> >> Non-ASCII characters in character vectors can be problematic for R >> packages, but sometimes they cannot be avoided. To make packages portable >> and build without 'R CMD check' warnings, my solution has been to convert >> problematic characters in functions and datasets to escaped ASCII, so >> plot(1,main="São Paulo") becomes plot(1,main="S\u00e3o Paulo"). >> >> The showNonASCII() function in package:tools is helpful to identify R >> source files where characters should be converted to ASCII one way or >> another, but I could not find a function to actually perform the >> conversion to ASCII. >> >> I have written the function ASCIIfy() to convert character vectors to >> ASCII. I imagine other R package developers might be looking for a similar >> tool, and it seems to me that package:tools is the first place they would >> look, where the R Core Team has provided a variety of tools for handling >> non-ASCII characters in package development. >> >> I hope the R Core Team will adopt ASCIIfy() into the 'tools' package, to >> make life easier for package developers outside the English-speaking >> world. I have of course no problem with them renaming or rewriting the >> function in any way. >> >> See the attached examples - all in flat ASCII that was prepared using the >> function itself! The main objective, though, is to ASCIIfy functions and >> datasets, not help pages. >> >> Arni >> >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
