[R] Unicode characters (R 2.7.0 on Windows XP SP3 and Hardy Heron)

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Fri May 30 22:16:55 CEST 2008


On 5/30/2008 4:12 PM, Hans-Joerg Bibiko wrote:
> Quoting Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>:
> 
>> On 5/30/2008 12:58 PM, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:
>>> to put it simply. Windows cannot handle utf-8 data. There is no   
>>> utf-8  locale available.
>>
>> Code page 65001 is utf-8.  Most text editors (including Notepad)
>> include an option to save in the UTF-8 encoding.
>>
>> Some programs don't fully support utf-8 (some don't even support the
>> native UCS-2), but most don't care.  That's the nice thing about utf-8.
>>
>> So in what sense can Windows not handle utf-8 data?
> 
> Of course, you're right. I only meant in that context R for Windows,  
> not Windows at all. Sorry for my incorrectness.

But I think with Brian Ripley's work over the last while, R for Windows 
actually handles utf-8 pretty well.  (It might not guess at that 
encoding, but if you tell it that's what you're using...)

Duncan Murdoch



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