R help - Nov 2006 - writing character to a file in UTF-8

Dear lister,

I would like to now if there a universal way to writing a character
vector to a file in UTF-8 encoding? By " universal", I mean a way
which works under Linux, Windows and Mac.

Thanks in advance!

-- 
Ronggui Huang
Department of Sociology
Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Hello,

Have a look at the function iconv, which converts a character vector  
from one encoding to another.

If you're not interested in converting from one encoding to another,  
and just want any character vector to be encoded as UTF-8, open the  
file in the following way, passing encoding="UTF-8".

fd <- file("My File", "w", encoding="UTF-8")

I know this works under Mac OS X and on Linux. I don't see why it  
shouldn't work on Windows too.

Wee-Jin

On 23 Nov 2006, at 11:45, ronggui wrote:
> Dear lister,
>
> I would like to now if there a universal way to writing a character
> vector to a file in UTF-8 encoding? By " universal", I mean a way
> which works under Linux, Windows and Mac.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> -- 
> Ronggui Huang
> Department of Sociology
> Fudan University, Shanghai, China
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting- 
> guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, ronggui wrote:
> I would like to now if there a universal way to writing a character
> vector to a file in UTF-8 encoding? By " universal", I mean a way
> which works under Linux, Windows and Mac.
You need to know what encoding the character vector is in.  If you know it 
to be in the charset of the current locale, something like

z <- file("outfile", "w", encoding="UTF-8")
write(char_vector, file=z)
close(z)

If not, you could use iconv() to convert it to UTF-8 and then use write() 
without specifying the encoding.

-- 
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