R help - Mar 2013 - Character change to Unicode format escape character when create a data frame

Hi, 
  I want to create a data frame including a column containing some special
characters, like "ø".  when I print that data frame out, the content
change to <U+00F8>, and when save the data frame to a txt file, the
content keep in that style, but I need it in its original form, anybody can
explain?

> x <- data.frame(part = c("målløs", "ny"))
> x
                  part
1 m<U+00E5>ll<U+00F8>s
2                   ny

x[1,1]
[1] målløs
Levels: m<U+00E5>ll<U+00F8>s ny


Regards!


-- 
Huidong Tian, Postdoc

Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences 


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On Mar 23, 2013, at 7:08 AM, Huidong Tian wrote:
> Hi, 
>  I want to create a data frame including a column containing some special
characters, like "?".  when I print that data frame out, the content
change to <U+00F8>, and when save the data frame to a txt file, the
content keep in that style, but I need it in its original form, anybody can
explain?
> 
> 
>> x <- data.frame(part = c("mll?s", "ny"))
>> x
>                  part
> 1 m<U+00E5>ll<U+00F8>s
> 2                   ny
> 
> x[1,1]
> [1] m?ll?s
> Levels: m<U+00E5>ll<U+00F8>s ny
> 
You have two problems. The trivial one is that by default data.frame stores
character input as factors. The more fundamental difficulty is that you do not
understand that display of characters is not the same as the internal
representation. You already have achieved your desire and do not realize it. The
number of characters in x[1,1] will be 6. Try it:
> x <- data.frame(part = c("m?ll?s", "ny"),
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
> x
    part
1 m?ll?s
2     ny
> nchar(x[1,1])
[1] 6

Also try:

cat(x)


It's just that <U+00E5> is one way of representing a character that is
not in the font table for the device you are working on. It is a single
character internally in UTF-8 encoding. My Mac does keep the '?' and my
sans font is Helvetica, but you may be on a machine with a different sans font.
> quartzFonts('sans')
$sans
[1] "Helvetica"             "Helvetica-Bold"       
"Helvetica-Oblique"
[4] "Helvetica-BoldOblique"


If you are on a different interactive device you should look at its help page to
see the manner in which you change settings. For me that is

?quartz   # but for you it might be ?windows


 If you want to see the printed translation to the input you can try cat() or
you can print to a device that has a font with the proper glyph. The system
setting can be adjusted with the various functions that specify the fonts in use
with various devices:

?Devices
?options
?Encoding
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
You should learn to post in plain-text. (Gmail does support that choice, but you
need to make the effort.) This si a question that can be machine dependent and
for any follow-up questions you need to include the output of sessionInfo as
requested in the Posting Guide.

-- 

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA