R help - Mar 2006 - Special characters: plus/minus

Hi R people!

:-)

I am printing a table of percentages (P) and their 95% confidence
interval half-widths (CI).

I would like to 

(i) create a character string of P and CI that has the plus/minus
character to the left of CI, then

(ii) use write.csv to save that file with the P, CI and the special
plus/minus character.



I poured over the r-help archives and did not find advice on this. That
advice could be there, but I did not see it! 


Thank you!

Phil Smith
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, GA

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On 3/20/2006 10:24 AM, Smith, Phil wrote:
> Hi R people!
> 
> :-)
> 
> I am printing a table of percentages (P) and their 95% confidence
> interval half-widths (CI).
> 
> I would like to 
> 
> (i) create a character string of P and CI that has the plus/minus
> character to the left of CI, then
> 
> (ii) use write.csv to save that file with the P, CI and the special
> plus/minus character.
> 
> 
> 
> I poured over the r-help archives and did not find advice on this. That
> advice could be there, but I did not see it! 
The plus/minus character isn't basic ascii, so you might run into 
character encoding problems with this.  It is Unicode character U+00B1, 
which is available in R as \u00B1 on some platforms, or directly using 
the Character Map utility to get it into the clipboard in Windows.  But 
be prepared for problems when you print.

An alternative is to use the ascii sequence +/-.  That's what I'd do.

Duncan Murdoch