x <- c("août", "élève", "ça va")
y <- iconv(x, "UTF-8", "latin1")
x
#> [1] "août" "élève" "ça va"
y
#> [1] "août" "élève" "ça va"
(note the difference in spacing)
On both R-release (mac) and R-devel (linux). nchar() and format() both look ok.
Hadley
--
http://had.co.nz/