On 14-02-04 7:57 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:


If I have a character such as "£" stored in a object called "xxx", how
can I obtain the hex code representation of this character?  In this
case I know that the hex code is "\u00A3", but if I didn't, how would I
find out?

charToRaw will give you the bytes used to store it:

> charToRaw("£")
[1] c2 a3

That was on MacOS, which uses UTF-8 encoding.  On Windows, using Latin1,

> charToRaw("£")
[1] a3

You won't see 00A3, because that's not an encoding that R uses, that's the Unicode "code point". It's not too hard to get to that from the UTF-8 encoding, but I don't know any R function that does it.


I would like a function "foo()" such that foo(xxx) would return, say,
the string "00A3".

I don't know how to get that string, but as.character(charToRaw(x)) will put the bytes for x in strings, e.g.

as.character(charToRaw("£"))

gives

[1] "c2" "a3"

on a Mac.


I have googled and otherwise searched around and have come up with
nothing that seemed at all helpful to me.  If I am missing something
obvious, please point me at it.

(I have found a table on the web, which contains the information that I
need, but it is only accessible "by eye" as far as I can discern.)

Supplementary question:  Suppose I have the string "00A3" stored in
an object called "yyy".  How do I put that string together with "\u"
so as to obtain "£"?  I thought I could do

        xxx <- paste("\u",yyy,sep="")

but R won't let me use "\u" "without hex digits".  How can I get around
this?

The \u notation with a code point is handled by the R parser, so you need to parse that string, which means putting it in quotes first, e.g.

xxx <- eval(parse(text = paste0("'\\u", yyy, "'")))

That seems pretty excessive. You'd probably be better off doing all of this in C instead...

Duncan Murdoch


Thanks.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

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