Thanks, Jan. Unfortunately I have huge streams of data to transmit and it should be mostly human readable, too, so escape encoding the entire string isn't an option. A workaround is that I found I can use the rjson package as in
> cat(toJSON(fromJSON("\"Unicode char: \ufffd\""))) "Unicode char: \ufffd" but this seems like an awful hack and suggests that there really is a better way to escape extended characters. > From: Jan T Kim <jtt...@googlemail.com> > Subject: Re: [R] Writing escaped unicode > Date: December 11, 2012 5:49:18 AM EST > To: r-help@r-project.org > > > On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 11:46:40PM -0500, David Kulp wrote: >> I'd like to write unicode strings using the "\u" escape syntax. According >> to the documentation, print.default or encodeString will escape unicode >> using the \u convention. In practice, I can't make it work. >> >>> b="Unicode character: \ufffd" >>> print.default(b) >> [1] "Unicode character: ???" >>> encodeString(b) >> [1] "Unicode character: ???" >> >> I want to write the string back out in the same escape formatting as I read >> it in. This is because I'm interfacing with some Ruby code that requires >> unicode to be in this escaped format. > > as I read the documentation, encodeString escapes control characters, > but not "unicode characters". The notion of a "unicode character" is > not entirely well defined, considering that the very mission of the > unicode consortium is to make sure that there are no non-unicode > characters... ;-) > >> From this it follows that replacing all characters with their \uxxxx > representation, e.g. by > > paste(sprintf("\\u%04x", utf8ToInt(b)), collapse = ""); > > should work with the Ruby client you try to talk to. Obviously, this > bloats the string rather more than necessary (particularly if most of > the characters are in the ASCII range), but if the volume you're > piping into the client is small, this may be good enough. > > Best regards, Jan > -- > +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ > | email: jtt...@gmail.com | > | WWW: http://www.jtkim.dreamhosters.com/ | > *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----* > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.