[R] How to replace German umlauts in strings?

[Dieter Menne]

Hans-Jörg Bibiko <bibiko <at> eva.mpg.de> writes:

> 
> On 10.04.2008, at 18:03, Hofert Marius wrote:
> > I have a file containing names of German students. These names
> > contain the characters "ä", "ö" or "ü" (German umlauts). I use
> > read.table() to read the file and let's assume the table is then
> > stored in a variable called "data". The names are then contained in
> > the first column, i.e. data[,1]. Now if I simply display the variable
> > "data", I see, that "ä" is replaced by \x8a, "ö" is replaced by \x9a
> > and so forth. 

This is strange. When I have a file umlaut.txt

Name
Äserich
Ömadel
Übermunsch

and read it in with 

umlaut = read.table("umlaut.txt", header = TRUE)
umlautasis = read.table("umlaut.txt", header = TRUE,as.is = TRUE)

I get the following in both cases: 

 umlautasis
        Name
1    Äserich
2     Ömadel
3 Übermunsch

This is on Windows Vista. I use it every day without ever having seen nasty
codings, typically with the following in latex

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} % For ü,ä


Dieter