On Feb 19, 2012, at 08:49 , Prof Brian Ripley wrote: > On 19/02/2012 07:30, Erin Hodgess wrote: >> Dear R People: >> >> I'm trying to replicate something that I saw on an R blog. >> >> The first step is to load in the .rda file, which is fine. >> >> However, some of the names of the columns in the data frame have >> special characters, accents, and such. > > Most of the world think characters with accents are normal, not special. The > difference for R is going to be whether they are alphanumeric or not. > >> How do I get around this on a basic keyboard, please? > > Copy-and-paste from names(dataframe) may work. But without an example or > knowing your OS or your locale (but I remember you are in the US) it is hard > to tell. > > The main issue is that what R regards as a valid name aka symbol depends on > the locale, and so strictly in a US locale no non-ASCII characters are valid > in names. In practice US locales tend to be set up either for a Western > European character set (Latin-1, cp1252) or so that all alphanumeric Unicode > characters in a human language are regarded as alphanumeric.
You could consider a strategy like this: > d <- data.frame(Æblefløde=1:2, Blåbærgrød=3:4) > d Æblefløde Blåbærgrød 1 1 3 2 2 4 > names(d) [1] "Æblefløde" "Blåbærgrød" > iconv(names(d),to="ASCII//TRANSLIT") [1] "AEbleflode" "Blabaergrod" > names(d) <- iconv(names(d),to="ASCII//TRANSLIT") > d AEbleflode Blabaergrod 1 1 3 2 2 4 (If the characters don't display correctly to begin with, you may need to figure out the appropriate from= argument to iconv() as well.) > >> >> Thanks, >> Erin >> >> > > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk > Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ > University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) > 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) > Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 > > ______________________________________________ > 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. -- Peter Dalgaard, Professor, Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Phone: (+45)38153501 Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.
