Weird, my (Ubuntu, shhhh don't tell Dirk) iconv doesn't add the backticks or single quotes.
> tst <- c("à", "è", "ì", "ò", "ù" , "À", "È", "Ì", "Ò", "Ù", "á", + "é", "í", "ó", "ú", "ý" , "Á", "É", "Í", "Ó", "Ú", "Ý") > iconv(tst, to="ASCII//TRANSLIT") [1] "a" "e" "i" "o" "u" "A" "E" "I" "O" "U" "a" "e" "i" "o" "u" "y" "A" "E" "I" [20] "O" "U" "Y" By the way, I'll take this moment to remind anyone interested that R still has trouble with embedded zeros in character strings. I may be abusing terminology, but I think that makes R "8-bit dirty". -Matt On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 14:01 -0400, David Winsemius wrote: > On Sep 7, 2010, at 1:35 PM, Matt Shotwell wrote: > > > If you know the encoding of the string, or if its encoding is the > > current locale encoding, then you can use the iconv function to > > convert > > the string to ASCII. Something like: > > > > iconv(accented.string, to="ASCII//TRANSLIT") > > > > While 7-bit ASCII does not permit accented characters, extended (8- > > bit) > > ASCII does. Hence, I'm not sure this will work. But it's worth a try. > > > tst <- c("à", "è", "ì", "ò", "ù" , "À", "È", "Ì", "Ò", "Ù", "á", > "é", "í", "ó", "ú", "ý" , "Á", "É", "Í", "Ó", "Ú", "Ý") > > iconv(tst, to="ASCII//TRANSLIT") > [1] "`a" "`e" "`i" "`o" "`u" "`A" "`E" "`I" "`O" "`U" "'a" "'e" "'i" > "'o" "'u" "'y" > [17] "'A" "'E" "'I" "'O" "'U" "'Y" > > gsub("`|\\'", "", iconv(tst, to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")) > [1] "a" "e" "i" "o" "u" "A" "E" "I" "O" "U" "a" "e" "i" "o" "u" "y" > "A" "E" "I" "O" > [21] "U" "Y" > > Notice that the accent acute gets converted to a single quote and > therefore needs to be dbl-\-ed to get recognized in an R regex pattern. > > On a Mac with: locale: > [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8 > -- Matthew S. Shotwell Graduate Student Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology Medical University of South Carolina ______________________________________________ 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.