R help - Apr 2010 - Problem with ONE of the Special German Characters

Dear List,

I have data which contain the special German characters "ä",
"ö", "ü" etc. After reading the
text files into R those characters are displayed strangely, e. g. "ä"
is  "ä". The first step is to
replace those with their typical transcription, e. g. "ä" becomes
"ae" by using the gsub
command.

Until I upgraded to version 2.10.1 (from 2.8.0) this worked perfectly for all
characters. Now it
works for all characters but "Ü".

temp1<-gsub("Ãoe","Ue",temp1)

This letter is displayed as "Ãoe" (as before), but R is no longer able
to find this character. The
problem seems to be linked to the "oe" part, since I could substitute
for "Ã" without a problem.
Strangely if I get the two characters by extracting them with the substr command
to a variable
and then using the variable I am able to substitute without a problem. Any
ideas, what I am
missing?

Thanks,

Michael

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On 15/04/2010 12:22 PM, Michael Stegh wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> I have data which contain the special German characters "?",
"?", "?" etc. After reading the
> text files into R those characters are displayed strangely, e. g.
"?" is  "??". The first step is to
> replace those with their typical transcription, e. g. "?" becomes
"ae" by using the gsub
> command.
>   
Your example of  "?" is what you would see if you stored it in UTF-8 
encoding, then read it in Latin1.  So I suspect you need to declare the 
encoding of the files you are reading before reading them.  You can do 
this as follows:

con <- file("foo.txt", encoding="UTF-8",
open="r")
readLines(con)
close(con)

By default, R assumes the encoding of files matches the default encoding 
on your system. 
> Until I upgraded to version 2.10.1 (from 2.8.0) this worked perfectly for
all characters. Now it
> works for all characters but "?".
>
> temp1<-gsub("?oe","Ue",temp1)
>   
You might want to try perl=TRUE in the gsub() call; it seems to handle 
strange characters in regular expressions better than the default TRE 
library does.

Duncan Murdoch
> This letter is displayed as "?oe" (as before), but R is no longer
able to find this character. The
> problem seems to be linked to the "oe" part, since I could
substitute for "?" without a problem.
> Strangely if I get the two characters by extracting them with the substr
command to a variable
> and then using the variable I am able to substitute without a problem. Any
ideas, what I am
> missing?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Michael
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
>   
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