UTF-8 on windows is a huge pain, this bites me often. Usually I give up and do the analysis on a Linux server. In previous struggles with this I've found this blog post enlightening: https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
Best, Ista On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:38 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimi...@club.fr> wrote: > Le lundi 16 septembre 2013 à 10:40 +0200, Milan Bouchet-Valat a écrit : >> Le vendredi 13 septembre 2013 à 23:38 +0400, Maxim Linchits a écrit : >> > This is a condensed version of the same question on stackexchange here: >> > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18789330/r-on-windows-character-encoding-hell >> > If you've already stumbled upon it feel free to ignore. >> > >> > My problem is that R on US Windows does not read *any* text file that >> > contains *any* foreign characters. It simply reads the first consecutive n >> > ASCII characters and then throws a warning once it reached a foreign >> > character: >> > >> > > test <- read.table("test.txt", sep=";", dec=",", quote="", >> > fileEncoding="UTF-8") >> > Warning messages: >> > 1: In read.table("test.txt", sep = ";", dec = ",", quote = "", fileEncoding >> > = "UTF-8") : >> > invalid input found on input connection 'test.txt' >> > 2: In read.table("test.txt", sep = ";", dec = ",", quote = "", fileEncoding >> > = "UTF-8") : >> > incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'test.txt' >> > > print(test) >> > V1 >> > 1 english >> > >> > > Sys.getlocale() >> > [1] "LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United >> > States.1252; >> > LC_MONETARY=English_United >> > States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252" >> > >> > >> > It is important to note that that R on linux will read UTF-8 as well as >> > exotic character sets without a problem. I've tried it with the exact same >> > files (one was UTF-8 and another was OEM866 Cyrillic). >> > >> > If I do not include the fileEncoding parameter, read.table will read the >> > whole CSV file. But naturally it will read it wrong because it does not >> > know the encoding. So whenever I try to specify the fileEncoding, R will >> > throw the warnings and stop once it reaches a foreign character. It's the >> > same story with all international character encodings. >> > Other users on stackexchange have reported exactly the same issue. >> > >> > >> > Is anyone here who is on a US version of Windows able to import files with >> > foreign characters? Please let me know. >> A reproducible example would have helped, as requested by the posting >> guide. >> >> Though I am also experiencing the same problem after saving the data >> below to a CSV file encoded in UTF-8 (you can do this using even the >> Notepad): >> "Ա","Բ" >> 1,10 >> 2,20 >> >> This is on a Windows 7 box using French locale, but same codepage 1252 >> as yours. What is interesting is that reading the file using >> readLines(file("myFile.csv", encoding="UTF-8")) >> gives no invalid characters. So there must be a bug in read.table(). >> >> >> But I must note I do not experience issues with French accentuated >> characters like "é" ("\Ue9"). On the contrary, reading Armenian >> characters like "Ա" ("\U531") gives weird results: the character appears >> as <U+0531> instead of Ա. >> >> Self-contained example, writing the file and reading it back from R: >> tmpfile <- tempfile() >> writeLines("\U531", file(tmpfile, "w", encoding="UTF-8")) >> readLines(file(tmpfile, encoding="UTF-8")) >> # "<U+0531>" >> >> The same phenomenon happens when creating a data frame from this >> character (as noted on StackExchange): >> data.frame("\U531") >> >> So my conclusion is that maybe Windows does not really support Unicode >> characters that are not "relevant" for your current locale. And that may >> have created bugs in the way R handles them in read.table(). R >> developers can probably tell us more about it. > After some more investigation, one part of the problem can be traced > back to scan() (with myFile.csv filled as described above): > scan("myFile.csv", encoding="UTF-8", sep=",", nlines=1) > # Read 2 items > # [1] "Ա" "Բ" > > Equivalent, but nonsensical to me: > scan("myFile.csv", fileEncoding="CP1252", encoding="UTF-8", sep=",", nlines=1) > # Read 2 items > # [1] "Ա" "Բ" > > scan("myFile.csv", fileEncoding="UTF-8", sep=",", nlines=1) > # Read 0 items > # character(0) > # Warning message: > # In scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dex, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, : > # invalid input found on input connection 'myFile.csv' > > > So there seem to be one part of the issue in scan(), which for some > reason does not work when passed fileEncoding="UTF-8"; and another part > in read.table(), which transforms "Ա" ("\U531") into "X.U.0531.", > probably via make.names(), since: > make.names("\U531") > # "X.U.0531." > > > Does this make sense to R-core members? > > > Regards > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.
