R help - Jun 2005 - Getting the character set

Hi R-gurus,

In python one can do
 >>> import string
 >>> print string.letters

and get the characters in the local character set.

This feature is often useful in Python, and if I could find it in R
I could make good use of it.

In R both Sys.getlocale() and localeToCharset() can tell me which 
charset I am using, but I haven't found a way to print out the
actual characters. Is there a way to do this?

Sincerely,
H.
-- 
------------------------------------------
Halldor Bjornsson   (halldor at vedur.is)
Vedurstofa Islands (Icelandic Met. Office)
Bustadavegur 9, IS-150, Reykjavik, Iceland

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Halldor Bj?rnsson wrote:
> Hi R-gurus,
>
> In python one can do
> >>> import string
> >>> print string.letters
>
> and get the characters in the local character set.
>
> This feature is often useful in Python, and if I could find it in R
> I could make good use of it.
>
> In R both Sys.getlocale() and localeToCharset() can tell me which
> charset I am using, but I haven't found a way to print out the
> actual characters. Is there a way to do this?
No.  There could be 2 billion of them, so I doubt Python really does as 
you say.

In an 8-bit character set you can use

rawToChar(as.raw(0:255), TRUE)

but you might have a 21-bit character set.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595