I have a length-1 character vector x, and I want to replace ' in the character into ''. What I do now is to iconv x into suitable current Encoding, then use gsub. It works well if I knows what x is (e.g. Chinese charater), as I can use suitable locales to handle it. ### it works x<- "some chinese character with ' in it" Encoding(x) <- "UTF-8" Sys.setlocale(,"CHS") gsub("'","''",x) ## It would be great if I can achieve the same effect without the suitable locales setting (e.g. even the Sys.setlocale(,"English") instead of Sys.setlocale(,"CHS")). Is it possible? Thanks. -- HUANG Ronggui, Wincent PhD Candidate Dept of Public and Social Administration City University of Hong Kong Home page: http://asrr.r-forge.r-project.org/rghuang.html