When running R in an ASCII locale (export LC_ALL=C) on Linux, is this
expected?
foo <- "\xe4"
Encoding(foo) <- "latin1"
foo
# [1] "<e4>"
nchar(foo)
# [1] 4
nchar(foo, type = "bytes")
# [1] 1
nchar(foo, type = "width")
# [1] 4
That is, the number of characters reported for the default 'type =
"chars"' is the number of characters (4) used for printing the unknown byte.
Obviously, one byte is one character in the single-byte ISO-8859-1
"latin1" encoding. Therefore I think the result of 4 characters for 1
byte is wrong, or unintuitive.
If this is as expected, maybe it should be mentioned in the '?nchar'
manual as a special case. Yes, I did try to read the manual for an
explanation. According to the manual, the result should be "The number
of human-readable characters", but there is the note that:
This does *not* by default give the number of characters that will
be used to 'print()' the string. Use 'encodeString' to find that.
For UTF-8 strings, nchar() does work correctly (as documented) even in
the C locale.
foo2 <- "\xc3\xa4"
Encoding(foo2) <- "UTF-8"
foo2
# [1] "<U+00E4>"
nchar(foo2)
# [1] 1
nchar(foo2, type = "bytes")
# [1] 2
nchar(foo2, type = "width")
# [1] 1
But, confusingly, encodeString() does not agree with print(), contrary
to the document '?encodeString':
encodeString(foo2)
# [1] "\\u00e4"
I was using "R Under development (unstable) (2017-02-23 r72248)".
--
Mikko Korpela
Department of Geosciences and Geography
University of Helsinki
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