R help - Nov 2012 - Sourcing files with Umlaut in path no longer works

Dear helpeRs,

on my new machine - Windows 7 64Bit, R 2.15-2, I can no longer source 
files for which the path contains the o-Umlaut (?). As a historical 
burden, my username is Gr?mping and contains that Umlaut (I wouldn't 
have chosen it now, but decided to keep it for easy transfer). I have 
had the difficulty that I couldn't use the R CMD tools on files with 
Umlauts in the path (and solved it by having a dedicated directory 
without umlaut in the path for that purpose), but so far (Windows XP and 
earlier R versions) sourcing from within R worked fine.

The issue is that the o-Umlaut (?) is always replaced by a capital A 
with tilde above together with a paragraph symbol (??). Apparently, the 
c3b6  used for the o-Umlaut in some encoding is translated back to the 
??. Can I somehow fix this? Or is it a bug?

Best regards,
Ulrike

On 12-11-21 6:49 AM, Ulrike Gr?mping wrote:
> Dear helpeRs,
>
> on my new machine - Windows 7 64Bit, R 2.15-2, I can no longer source
> files for which the path contains the o-Umlaut (?). As a historical
> burden, my username is Gr?mping and contains that Umlaut (I wouldn't
> have chosen it now, but decided to keep it for easy transfer). I have
> had the difficulty that I couldn't use the R CMD tools on files with
> Umlauts in the path (and solved it by having a dedicated directory
> without umlaut in the path for that purpose), but so far (Windows XP and
> earlier R versions) sourcing from within R worked fine.
>
> The issue is that the o-Umlaut (?) is always replaced by a capital A
> with tilde above together with a paragraph symbol (??). Apparently, the
> c3b6  used for the o-Umlaut in some encoding is translated back to the
> ??. Can I somehow fix this? Or is it a bug?

Can you change directory, and then source without the Gr?mping in the path?

Duncan Murdoch

On Nov 21, 2012, at 12:49 , Ulrike Gr?mping wrote:
> Dear helpeRs,
> 
> on my new machine - Windows 7 64Bit, R 2.15-2, I can no longer source files
for which the path contains the o-Umlaut (?). As a historical burden, my
username is Gr?mping and contains that Umlaut (I wouldn't have chosen it
now, but decided to keep it for easy transfer). I have had the difficulty that I
couldn't use the R CMD tools on files with Umlauts in the path (and solved
it by having a dedicated directory without umlaut in the path for that purpose),
but so far (Windows XP and earlier R versions) sourcing from within R worked
fine.
> 
> The issue is that the o-Umlaut (?) is always replaced by a capital A with
tilde above together with a paragraph symbol (??). Apparently, the c3b6  used
for the o-Umlaut in some encoding is translated back to the ??. Can I somehow
fix this? Or is it a bug?
Without a reproducible example, it is hard to tell where things are going wrong,
but the symptoms are those of utf-8 codes being sent to something that expects
latin1 (or one of the "8th bit ASCII" variations, anyway).
> 
> Best regards,
> Ulrike
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com

On 21/11/2012 6:49 AM, Ulrike Gr?mping wrote:
> Dear helpeRs,
>
> on my new machine - Windows 7 64Bit, R 2.15-2, I can no longer source
> files for which the path contains the o-Umlaut (?). As a historical
> burden, my username is Gr?mping and contains that Umlaut (I wouldn't
> have chosen it now, but decided to keep it for easy transfer). I have
> had the difficulty that I couldn't use the R CMD tools on files with
> Umlauts in the path (and solved it by having a dedicated directory
> without umlaut in the path for that purpose), but so far (Windows XP and
> earlier R versions) sourcing from within R worked fine.
>
> The issue is that the o-Umlaut (?) is always replaced by a capital A
> with tilde above together with a paragraph symbol (??). Apparently, the
> c3b6  used for the o-Umlaut in some encoding is translated back to the
> ??. Can I somehow fix this? Or is it a bug?
>
I can't reproduce this.  The file d:/temp/Gr?mping/test.R contains

cat("it worked!\n")

I am on Windows 7 64bit, and I see the following in both 32 and 64 bit R:

 > source("d:/temp/Gr?mping/test.R")
it worked!

If I look at Encoding("d:/temp/Gr?mping/test.R") I get
"latin1".  If I run

iconv("d:/temp/Gr?mping/test.R", "latin1",
"UTF-8")

I get a proper UTF-8 string, but if I run

iconv("d:/temp/Gr?mping/test.R", "latin1", "utf8")

I get a string with encoding marked as "unknown", and displayed as

[1] "d:/temp/Gr??mping/test.R"

So perhaps you or we have used an unofficial name of the UTF-8 encoding 
in some conversion.  We need to know exactly what you did to pursue this.

Duncan Murdoch


Duncan Murdoch