[R] Symbol "£" crashs R in Win98

[Haifeng (Kevin) Xie]

Dear R users,

> version
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     x86            
os       Win32          
system   x86, Win32     
status                  
major    1              
minor    4.1            
year     2002           
month    01             
day      30             
language R           

I was trying to read in some data in a text file. In the data file, some 
of the column headings contain the symbol "£". In order to cope with that, 
I first use "scan" to read in the column headings and then use 
"read.table" with "skip = 1" to get the rest of the data (numbers). I then 
re-associate the column headings with the resulting data frame. More 
specifically, I used:

> col.headings <- scan("myfile.txt", what = "", nlines = 1)
> my.data <- read.table("myfile.txt", skip = 1, header = F)
> names(my.data) <- col.headings

There was no complaint. But when I try to look at the data, e.g., 

> summary(my.data) 

R crashed (illegal operation). Then I realised that: R will crash whenever 
the "£" symbol is typed. I'm using Microsoft Windows 98 SE, all settings 
regarding keyboard layout, regional setting are correct. The very same 
codes were trouble free when tried on a Linux box. 

Did anybody encounter similar problem? Is this problem only associated to 
Win98 or MS Windows in general? Any way around? Well, I could have changed 
to "$" instead of sticking to "£". 

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Kevin Xie

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