[R] How to read.table with “Hebrew” column names (in R)?

[William Dunlap]

I tried this on R 2.11.0 unstable (2010-03-07 r51225) using
encoding="UTF-8" and check.names=FALSE in read.table().
It seemed to basically work, except that the data.frame/matrix printing
routine wants to print the Unicode codes for the characters
in the names:

   > data1 <- read.table("http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt",
       header = TRUE, sep = "\t", encoding="UTF-8", check.names=FALSE)
   > data1 # I see Unicode codes, presumably the correct ones
     <U+05D0><U+05D7><U+05EA> <U+05E9><U+05EA><U+05D9><U+05D9><U+05DD>
   1                       12                                       97
   2                      123                                      354
   3                        6                                        1
     <U+05E9><U+05DC><U+05D5><U+05E9>
   1                                6
   2                               44
   3                                3 
   > colnames(data1) # I see Hebrew strings (in R the first starts with aleph)
   [1] "אחת"   "שתיים" "שלוש"
   > colnames(data)[1]
   [1] "אחת" 
   > strsplit(colnames(data)[1], "")[[1]][1]
   [1] "א"
   > data1[,"שתיים"]
   [1]  97 354   1

I'm writing this in Outlook in the English (American) locale
and the copy-n-paste from the R gui window to the Outlook window
of the Hebrew letters reversed the whole line of them (reversing
the characters in each name and the names in the line), which I
why I showed a subset of the names and a substring of the first name.

However, when I try to use lm() with this data.frame then I run into
trouble, which is probably the same problem as I see in the
data.frame printing:

   > lm(`שתיים` ~ `שלוש`)
   Error: \uxxxx sequences not supported inside backticks (line 1)

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Tal Galili
> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 2:41 PM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] How to read.table with “Hebrew” column names (in R)?
> 
> (I am reposting this question after a few months without a 
> solution...)
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I am trying to read a .txt file, with Hebrew column names, but without
> success.
> 
> I uploaded an example file to: http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt
> 
> And tried the command:
> 
> read.table("http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt", header = 
> T, sep = "\t")
> 
> This returns me with:
> 
>   X.....ª X...ª...... X...œ....
> 1      12          97         6
> 2     123         354        44
> 3       6           1         3
> 
> Instead of:
> 
> אחת שתיים   שלוש
> 12  97  6
> 123 354 44
> 6   1   3
> 
> 
>  Trying to use something like:
> 
> read.table("http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt",fileEncodin
> g ="iso8859-8")
> 
> Has resulted in:
> 
>  V1
> 1  ?
> Warning messages:
> 1: In read.table("http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt", fileEncoding
> = "iso8859-8") :
> 
>   invalid input found on input connection
> 'http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt'
> 2: In read.table("http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt", fileEncoding
> = "iso8859-8") :
> 
>   incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on
> 'http://www.talgalili.com/files/aa.txt'
> 
> While also trying this:
> 
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8")
> 
> Or this:
> 
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", 
> "en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8")
> 
> Get's me this:
> 
> [1] ""
> Warning message:
> In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8") :
> 
>   OS reports request to set locale to "en_US.UTF-8" cannot be honored
> 
> 
> 
> My output for:
> 
> l10n_info()
> 
> Is:
> 
> $MBCS
> [1] FALSE
> 
> $`UTF-8`
> [1] FALSE
> 
> $`Latin-1`
> [1] TRUE
> 
> $codepage
> [1] 1252
> 
> And for:
> 
> Sys.getlocale()
> 
> Is:
> 
> [1] "LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
> States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
> States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252"
> 
> Finally, here is the > sessionInfo()
> 
> R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
> 
> i386-pc-mingw32
> 
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1255  LC_CTYPE=English_United
> States.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
> 
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] tools_2.10.1
> 
> 
> Any suggestion or clarification will be appreciated.
> 
> 
> 
> Best,
> 
> Tal
> 
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il 
> (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------------------
> 
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> 
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