My e-mail was intended as a typical "feature request", and I couldn't find any more suitable place for that than the r-devel mailing list. I am not a programmer, so I don't have the skills to write this into R's source code myself.
The incentive is nevertheless clear enough. I believe a software program in 2013 which imports, manipulates, and exports text in various formats (text files, picture files, postscript files, etc.) would normally be expected to support UTF-8. It might not be trivial to implement as R is written now, but the expectation will still be there. So I still believe it would be a good idea if R soon would be able to support UTF-8. I'm not quite able to piece together from the information you gave what the underlying issues are. What I read is: (1) Some R functions convert characters to the native encoding. (2) Windows did not support UTF-8 when R was first written. (3) Unix did not support UCS-2 when R was first written. I'm guessing here that the implications are: (1) R's write.table() converts characters to a native encoding. (2) The native encoding in Windows 7 is not UTF-8. (3) The native encoding in Unix systems is UTF-8. But this is just guesswork. PS. A related issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19881553/using-unicode-inside-rs-expression-command Sverre ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
