[R] Comparing Latin characters with and without accents?

[Spencer Graves]

Hello, All:  


	  What do people do to strip accents from latin characters, returning vanilla ASCII?  


	  For example, I want to convert ‘Raúl’ to “Raul”.  Milan (below) suggested 'iconv(x, “",  "ASCII//TRANSLIT”)’.  This worked under Windows but failed on Linux and Mac.  It’s part of the “subNonStandardCharacters” function in the Ecfun package.  The development version on R-Forge uses this and returns “Raul” under Windows and NA under Mac OS X (and something different from “Raul”, presumably NA, under Linux).    


	  Thanks, 
	  Spencer 


> On Nov 30, 2014, at 2:32 AM, Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at structuremonitoring.com> wrote:
> 
> Wonderful.  Thanks very much.  Spencer
> 
> 
> On 11/30/2014 2:25 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
>> Le dimanche 30 novembre 2014 à 02:14 -0800, Spencer Graves a écrit :
>>> Hello:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>        How can one convert Latin characters with to the corresponding
>>> characters without?  For example, I want to convert "ú" to "u", similar
>>> to how tolower('U') returns "u".
>>> 
>>> 
>>>        This can be done using chartr{base}, e.g., chartr('ú', 'u',
>>> 'Raúl') returns "Raul".  However, I wondered if a simpler version of
>>> this is available.
>> This appears to work:
>>> iconv("ù", "", "ASCII//TRANSLIT")
>> [1] "u"
>> 
>> 
>> Regards
>> 
>>>        Thanks,
>>>        Spencer
>>> 
>>> 
>>> p.s.   findFn('convert to ascii') found 117 help pages in 70 packages.
>>> A brief review identified two to "Convert to ASCII": ASCIIfy {gtools}
>>> and stri_enc_toascii {stringi}.  Neither of these did what I expected.
>>> 
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> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org 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.