On 13-11-10 7:31 AM, Sverre Stausland wrote:
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.
R does support UTF-8. It all works smoothly in a UTF-8 locale, not so
smoothly if you have your computer set up to use a different 8 bit encoding.
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.
You got it right for the first 4. Regarding (2) in your second list,
that's right, and in fact UTF-8 is not supported as a native encoding.
And point (3) is optional, though UTF-8 is the dominant encoding nowadays.
The easiest solution is for you to switch to a Unix variant and set it
up to use UTF-8 as the native encoding.
Next easiest would be for Microsoft to add UTF-8 as a code page.
Most difficult would be for R to handle UTF-8 properly on systems with
limited support for it.
We probably will add small changes that let you work around the Windows
problems, but they won't be very satisfactory to anyone. I don't think
we will make the big changes that would make R look like "a software
program in 2013", since it would be so much work, and there's such an
easy workaround.
Duncan Murdoch
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
