[R] Find out what "native.enc" corresponds to

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 05/08/2012 09:54, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'm using R2HTML in my RcmdrPlugin.temis package to output localized
> strings to a HTML file. Thus, I insert a simple header at the top of the
> file to specify what encoding is used; if I don't do that, Web browsers
> assume it is latin1, which is not always true.
>
> My problem is, I could not find a way to detect what encoding is used by
> R2HTML in the most general case. R2HTML simply calls cat() with the file
> name, which means the text connection is opened using file(encoding =
> getOption("encoding")). This is fine, except that when
> getOption("encoding")) is set to "native.enc", I'm not able to find out
> the real encoding that was used for output.
>
> Of course, ideally I would tell R2HTML to output everything as UTF-8,
> and I would add this information to the header. But AFAICT this is not
> possible in the current state of this package. So I would be very
> grateful if somebody could provide me with a solution to resolve
> "native.enc" to the encoding name.

?options points you to ?connections, which does explain this.  See 
Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE") to see

'the internal encoding of the current locale'

(or at least, what the OS claims it to be: e.g. some lie about 'C' locales).

As for a name, iconv() knows this as "" (and some OSes do make it rather 
hard to find a name if it is not part of the locale name).

-- 
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