[R] Fwd: Re: read.spss and encodings

[John Kane]

--- John Kane <jrkrideau at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 09:07:11 -0500 (EST)
> From: John Kane <jrkrideau at yahoo.ca>
> Subject: Re: [R] read.spss and encodings
> To: Thomas Friedrichsmeier
> <thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
> 
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> I am using R 2.4.1 on WindowsXP and I don't seem to
> be
> having any problem, im Büro, and zuhause are coming
> in
>  just fine in a 200 line dataset. 
> 
> I have imported it with both read.spss and spss.get
> (package Hmisc) with no problems.
> 
> I am afraid I have no idea what the problem is but
> it
> does not seem to be specifically an R problem
> 
> --- Thomas Friedrichsmeier
> <thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
> 
> > Hi!
> > 
> > I'm having trouble with importing spss files
> > containing non-ascii characters 
> > (R 2.4.1, debian linux, i386). To reproduce:
> > 
> > Download the following file: 
> >
>
http://statmath.wu-wien.ac.at/data/spss/de/comphomeneu.sav
> > 
> > require (foreign)
> > Sys.setlocale (locale="C")
> > read.spss("comphomeneu.sav")$ARBEIT[1]
> > # prints:
> > # [1] im B\374ro
> > # Levels: im B\374ro zuhause
> > 
> > \374 of course is actually a u-umlaut. However, I
> > guess in the C locale it's 
> > not expected to print as such. But now try this
> (use
> > any UTF-8 locale you may 
> > have installed):
> > 
> > Sys.setlocale (locale="de_DE.UTF-8")
> > read.spss("comphomeneu.sav")$ARBEIT[1]
> > # prints:
> > # [1]Error in print.default(xx, quote = quote,
> ...)
> > :
> > #        invalid multibyte string
> > 
> > To me it looks, like read.spss () would probably
> > need an encoding parameter, 
> > and / or some iconv () magic. Now, locale
> conversion
> > always makes my head 
> > spin, so I thought I'd better post here, before
> > calling this to be a bug in 
> > R. Two questions:
> > 
> > 1) Is there some way to work around this, i.e.
> make
> > sure it is converted to 
> > proper UTF-8 while importing? Am I missing
> something
> > obvious?
> > 2) Should I submit this as a bug report?
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > Thomas Friedrichsmeier
> > > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained,
> > reproducible code.
> > 
> 
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?

> protection around 
> http://mail.yahoo.com 
>