Re: [Rd] Problem with UTF-8 text in the Rcmdr package

[Prof Brian Ripley]

The issue appears to be the Rcmdr output window and menus.  They are done 
using Tcl/Tk, not by R.  So this might be a problem in Tcl/Tk or the fonts 
it uses, or it might be problem with what Rcmdr passes to the tcltk 
package.


We need the means to reproduce this (as per the posting guide):

- what OSes are affected?  Does this occur in a UTF-8 locale on Linux, for 
example?


- in what locales?

- what versions of Tcl/Tk?  Note that shipped with Windows R 
changed between 2.5.1 and 2.7.x.


- Is this anything to do with translations?  I've not looked at how 
translations are done in Rcmdr, but if gettext() is used, the string 
passed to R for output is in the native encoding, so 'UTF-8 characters' is 
incorrect.  It is possible that it is an iconv problem if the translations 
are supplied in UTF-8 and not Latin-2.


There are far too many layers involved here to guess at what is going on.
My guess is that it ought to be possible to give a simple example of a 
string which can be output to the Rcmdr console and will be rendered 
incorrectly (together with a screen shot of how it is rendered).


I think the characters referred to are the Unicode glyphs 's and z with 
caron', \u0161 and \u017E.  It seems that these will only be displayable 
in Rcmdr on Windows in a Latin-2 locale, which I do not have set up on 
Windows (but believe I could get installed).  However, examples using that 
(and the menus) seem to be correct in both sl_SI.iso88592 and sl_SI.utf8 
on Linux, which suggests that this is probably not an R issue but a Tcl/Tk 
one.


On Fri, 5 Sep 2008, John Fox wrote:


Dear list members,

I've attached some email correspondence with Jaro Lajovic (with his 
permission), detailing a problem with the Slovenian translation file for 
the Rcmdr package.


Unfortunately, it is not 'detailed', and we do need the details.

In brief, while certain UTF-8 characters used in Slovenian used to 
appear properly in older versions of R, some characters do not display 
properly in the Rcmdr menus and output window under R 2.7.x. I've 
confirmed the problem with the current version of the Rcmdr package 
(1.4-0) and R 2.7.2 under Windows Vista.


I've checked the R docs and NEWS file for changes to R, but wasn't able 
to turn up anything that seemed relevant. Frankly, however, my 
understanding of how various character sets are handled is only partial.


Any help would be appreciated.

John

--
John Fox, Professor
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox


-Original Message-
From: Jaro.Lajovic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: August-26-08 2:57 AM
To: John Fox
Subject: Re: Slovenian Rcmdr .po and .mo - and a problem

Dear John,


That seems to imply that there's a change in R rather than in the Rcmdr
that produced this problem. Do you notice the problem with any other
packages that use translation or with R itself?


As for other translated R packages, I am afraid I am not aware of any.
However, a quick test using cat with special characters:
cat "ČŠŽčšž\n"
reveals that the string prints OK in the R (2.7.1.) console. The command
line also shows OK in the Rcmdr Script window, but does not display
right in the Output window. Special chars also fail in the Messages window.

Input (Script window) thus seems not to be affected, while the menu
system and output do not work properly.

Thank you very much,
Jaro



On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:54:43 +0200
 "Jaro.Lajovic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Dear John,


One question though: I assume from your message that the previous
version of the Rcmdr worked OK with R 2.7.1. Is that right?

No, the version 1.3-5 (that I still have with R 2.5.1) does not work
with R 2.7.1 either. So:

Rcmdr 1.3-5 with R 2.5.1: works OK.
Rcmdr 1.3-5 with R 2.7.1: does not work properly.
Rcmdr 1.4-0 with R 2.7.1: does not work properly.

Thank you in advance,
Jaro




On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:52:32 +0200
 "Jaro.Lajovic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Dear John,

Please find attached zipped Slovenian versions of .po (plain text

and

UTF-8 coded text) and .mo files.

However, there seems to be a problem I have not been able to

resolve.

While special characters display properly under R version 2.5.1

with

Rcmdr 1.3-5, they fail to display (= are substituted by black

blocks)

under R version 2.7.1 with the new Rcmdr 1.4-0. By the way: the

.mo

file of the ver. 1.3-5 copied to 1.4-0 also failed to display
properly.

(An additional detail: three special characters that are used in

the

Slo version are c, s and z with hacek. c with hacek is not

affected,

it is just s and z with hacek that are not displayed OK.)

Your advice will be much appreciated.

With best regards,
Jaro



John Fox, Professor
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/



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[Rd] New relations between S3, S4 classes (was: Re: '"ts" treated as a registered S3 class ...)

[John Chambers]

This specific bug led to a much more general enhancement (which is what 
one hopes will happen occasionally from bug reports).  Changes to 
version 2.8.0 (r-devel) were committed today that fix the bug reported 
below, via the general changes.


General problem:  For "ts" and some other S3 classes, one would like to 
assert some S4 behavior (slot classes and/or inheritance) along with the 
S3 inheritance via setOldClass().


The solution is to allow an S4 class definition to be supplied to 
setOldClass(), along with the Classes argument to give the inheritance.  
See ?setOldClass and the new material in the NEWS file.


Classes "ts", "mts", and "data.frame" have revised S4 definitions using 
this feature.  (Any other candidates?  The requirement is that one 
_really_ can assert that the S3 class has known attributes of known 
class and/or that all the code behaves correctly as if the class 
inherited from a virtual class, such as "structure".  Not that often 
that such assertions reliably apply to S3 classes.)


A slightly related enhancement to setOldClass has been introduced at the 
same time.  The created S4 class now has the S3 inheritance coded 
complete in the prototype of the S4 class.  This means that mutiple S3 
classes sharing the same inheritance can be declared to setOldClass() by 
just giving the first class they inherit from--the rest of the 
inheritance will be filled in automatically.  (Only relevant if you have 
S3 classes with a fairly deep inheritance structrue.)


A new technique using the information is to "fill in" the S3 inheritance 
by a special mechanism:

 as(x, "S3")
where x is an S3 object with perhaps just a single S3 class in its class 
attribute.  The object returned will have filled in the inheritance, S3 
style, if the classes involved have been registered by setOldClass().  
See ?S3





John Chambers wrote:

Yohan Chalabi wrote:

Dear all,

In R-devel I have noticed the new approach for the "ts" class in the
package "methods".

the "structure" behaviour of "ts" is not always kept when one uses
"ts" objects and objects of classes which extend the virtual class
"structure".

As a short example:

## this works fine
setClass("foo", representation(header = "character"), contains = 
"structure")

foo <- new("foo", 1:10, header = "foo")
ts <- ts(1:10)
foo / ts

## but the problem appears when one defines an "Ops" method for class 
"foo"

setMethod("Ops", c("foo", "foo"),
   function(e1, e2) {
   .Data <- callGeneric([EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED])
   header <- paste([EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], sep = "_")
   new("foo", .Data, header = header)
   })
foo <- new("foo", 1:10, header = "foo")
foo + foo
ts <- ts(1:10)
foo / ts
# Error in getDataPart(1:10) : no '.Data' slot defined for class "ts"

Is this the expected behavior?
  

No, not expected.  It may take some special treatement to fix it, though.

Your subject heading is indeed the problem.  Normally, the structure 
of an S3 class is a black box, and no S4 slots should usually be 
associated with it when it's registered via setOldClass.


However, just because "ts" does want to be a "structure" class, it 
would be nice to give it a .Data slot.  I'll experiment with this and 
see if it causes other things to break immediately.


Thanks for the report.

John Chambers

regards,
Yohan

--
PhD student
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Zurich

www.ethz.ch

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