R help - Apr 2013 - Text Encoding

Dear R-Help,

I am using the RDF package/ R 2.14 with the RDF package to download data
from a website, and then use R to manipulate it.

Text on the website is UTF-8.  The RDF package's rdf_load command is
converting it into a different encoding, which converts non-ASCII
characters to unicode codes.

On the webpage/sparql RDF: "4.5µg of cDNA was used"

In R, the RDF triple gives: "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"

I can't seem to convert it back from \\u00B5  into "µ".

I've tried iconv with various settings without
success:
> iconv(test, "latin1", "UTF-8")
[1] "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"

And, I tried Encoding, to see if I could figure that out, but it returns
"unknown" on my string.
> Encoding(test)
[1] "unknown"


Anyone have any ideas on how to correct/convert the text encoding?


Thanks!
-Emily

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Le vendredi 05 avril 2013 ? 14:30 -0400, Emily Ottensmeyer a ?crit
:
> Dear R-Help,
> 
> I am using the RDF package/ R 2.14 with the RDF package to download data
> from a website, and then use R to manipulate it.
> 
> Text on the website is UTF-8.  The RDF package's rdf_load command is
> converting it into a different encoding, which converts non-ASCII
> characters to unicode codes.
> 
> On the webpage/sparql RDF: "4.5g of cDNA was used"
> 
> In R, the RDF triple gives: "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"
> 
> I can't seem to convert it back from \\u00B5  into "".
Beware that \\u00B5 is the micro sign (greek letter mu), not "". This
is
probably an important information...
> I've tried iconv with various settings without success:
> > iconv(test, "latin1", "UTF-8")
> [1] "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"
\\u00B5 looks like UTF-16, not UTF-8. Does this work?
iconv(test, "UTF-16", "UTF-8")
> And, I tried Encoding, to see if I could figure that out, but it returns
> "unknown" on my string.
> > Encoding(test)
> [1] "unknown"
> 
> 
> Anyone have any ideas on how to correct/convert the text encoding?
Can you provide us the file, or at least the required parts of it?

You can also try loading the file using xmlParse() from the XML package.


Regards

On Apr 5, 2013, at 11:30 AM, Emily Ottensmeyer wrote:
> Dear R-Help,
> 
> I am using the RDF package/ R 2.14 with the RDF package to download data
> from a website, and then use R to manipulate it.
> 
> Text on the website is UTF-8.  The RDF package's rdf_load command is
> converting it into a different encoding, which converts non-ASCII
> characters to unicode codes.
> 
> On the webpage/sparql RDF: "4.5?g of cDNA was used"
> 
> In R, the RDF triple gives: "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"
> 
> I can't seem to convert it back from \\u00B5  into "?".
> 
> I've tried iconv with various settings without success:
>> iconv(test, "latin1", "UTF-8")
> [1] "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"
> 
> And, I tried Encoding, to see if I could figure that out, but it returns
> "unknown" on my string.
>> Encoding(test)
> [1] "unknown"
> 
On my device entering this: "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"

... returns [1] "4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used"

But entering: "4.5\u00B5g of cDNA was used" returns:

[1] "4.5?g of cDNA was used"
> nchar("4.5\\u00B5g of cDNA was used")
[1] 27
> nchar("4.5\u00B5g of cDNA was used")
[1] 22

So the doubled "\" is really a single character in the first case  and
has no effect in escaping the next four hex digits but "\u00B5" in the
second case is a correct "micro-character" (for my setup with my
fonts)

If this is a systematic problem then you should contact the maintainer with a
full problem description and a link to the website. If this is just a one-off
problem just remove the extraneous backslash.

-- 
David.
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.0 RC (2013-03-31 r62463)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
<snipped>
> Anyone have any ideas on how to correct/convert the text encoding?
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> -Emily
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA