[R] R 1.9.0, special characters in variable names.

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Ingolfsson, Olafur wrote:

> "Sixten Borg" <sb at ihe.se> writes:
> When I use these as variable names in a data.frame, odd things happen:
> > data.frame(a=1, å=2, ä=3, ö=4)
> >   a å ä X.
> > 1 1 2 3  4
>  ---- 
> I your variables only include numbers (or only characters), this works
> 
> XX <-  cbind(a=1, å=2, ä=3, ö=4, æ=5, ø=6)
> > XX
>      a å ä ö æ ø
> [1,] 1 2 3 4 5 6
> But this doesn't
> > data.frame(XX)
>   a å ä X. Xæ X.
> 1 1 2 3  4  5  6
> 
> i.e. it is the data.frame function that manages to mess up the variable
> names for us Windows users

No.  It is your OS that is at fault, plus the user who did not think 
to use check.names=FALSE to work around the problems of his machine.

Can we stop blaming R for things which are not its fault, especially as 
that has already been pointed out twice this morning?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595