R help - Mar 2016 - Please guide -- UTF-8 locale setting fails on Windows on writing

Hi,
I think I'm experiencing an issue regarding system Locale. I have
exported '.csv' formatted data frames gathered from various social
media platforms like facebook/twitter/G+, etc.

I observe many variable/columns consists of strings formatted similar to below:
"<U+0645><U+062D><U+0645><U+062F>
<U+0627><U+0644><U+0633><U+0648><U+0627><U+062D>"

As expected and I confirmed, in social media data, they are strings in
different languages.
Platform details are provide in the end of this mail. OS locale is set
to English (United States) hence 'R' locale is 'English_United
States.1252'

I have attempted to change it to UTF-8 but receives below warning message:

Warning message:
In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "UTF-8") :
  OS reports request to set locale to "UTF-8" cannot be honored


I have gone through below forums but no resolution so far:
--- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20571147/how-to-set-unicode-locale-in-r
--- https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067940.html
--- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r
--- https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
--- http://withr.me/configure-character-encoding-for-r-under-linux-and-windows/

I'm not sure whether the issue is while reading/extracting the data
from media or while writing/exporting in Windows directory, but I
don't experience similar issue in my personal Mac machine. I need some
clarification here.

How could I export the data just as I see on web ?  Please guide.

Regards,
Sunny

Platform I'm using::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Operating System : Windows 7 Professional SP1
R version details:
platform       x86_64-w64-mingw32
arch           x86_64
os             mingw32
system         x86_64, mingw32
status
major          3
minor          2.3
year           2015
month          12
day            10
svn rev        69752
language       R
version.string R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
nickname       Wooden Christmas-Tree

Le lundi 28 mars 2016 ? 19:16 +0530, Sunny Singha a
?crit?:
> Hi,
> I think I'm experiencing an issue regarding system Locale. I have
> exported '.csv' formatted data frames gathered from various social
> media platforms like facebook/twitter/G+, etc.
> 
> I observe many variable/columns consists of strings formatted similar to
below:
> "
> "
> 
> As expected and I confirmed, in social media data, they are strings in
> different languages.
> Platform details are provide in the end of this mail. OS locale is set
> to English (United States) hence 'R' locale is 'English_United
> States.1252'
> 
> I have attempted to change it to UTF-8 but receives below warning message:
> 
> Warning message:
> In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "UTF-8") :
> ? OS reports request to set locale to "UTF-8" cannot be honored
You don't need to set the locale. Just pass an appropriate value (e.g.
"UTF-8") to read.csv() or write.csv()'s fileEncoding argument.

You also didn't tell us what program you used to read these files. Some
might guess the encoding incorrectly, or require you to choose it
manually.


Regards
> I have gone through below forums but no resolution so far:
> ---
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20571147/how-to-set-unicode-locale-in-r
> --- https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067940.html
> --- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r
> --- https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
> ---
http://withr.me/configure-character-encoding-for-r-under-linux-and-windows/
> 
> I'm not sure whether the issue is while reading/extracting the data
> from media or while writing/exporting in Windows directory, but I
> don't experience similar issue in my personal Mac machine. I need some
> clarification here.
> 
> How could I export the data just as I see on web ???Please guide.
> 
> Regards,
> Sunny
> 
> Platform I'm using::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> Operating System : Windows 7 Professional SP1
> R version details:
> platform???????x86_64-w64-mingw32
> arch???????????x86_64
> os?????????????mingw32
> system?????????x86_64, mingw32
> status
> major??????????3
> minor??????????2.3
> year???????????2015
> month??????????12
> day????????????10
> svn rev????????69752
> language???????R
> version.string R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
> nickname???????Wooden Christmas-Tree
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> 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.

Milan,
Ok, Let me take a case of facebook. I used Rfacebook package
 to get posts (getPost()) which returns list() of data frames(post,
comments, Likes)

let me demonstrate 2 cases of read and write just as you suggested,
Case 1:::::::::
Lets say one of the facebook comment has below string value, in
Japanese language-->
"?????? - ???????? ?????"

On R console I now assign above string to variableas: x <- "?????? -
???????? ?????"
and write it as below:
write.csv(x, file='x.csv', row.names=F, fileEncoding='UTF-8')
I get this string in the file
""<U+4E16><U+754C><U+9910><U+798F><U+4E8B><U+5DE5>
-
<U+9910><U+5EF3><U+54E1><U+5DE5><U+6C92><U+7CBE><U+6253><U+91C7>
"

Case 2::::::::::::::
I create a notepad 'x.txt' and save Japanese string "?????? -
???????? ?????"
and read it as below:
read.table('x.txt', fileEncoding='UTF-8'), I get below output:

  V1
1  ?
Warning messages:
1: In read.table("x.txt", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") :
  invalid input found on input connection 'x.txt'
2: In read.table("x.txt", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") :
  incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'x.txt'

Above was for demonstration, I'm infact reading social media data
extracted, which ultimately is somewhere using httr package and
returning data frames.
I'm not sure how should I get it handled in Windows as I don't observe
this behavior in Mac where system locase is set to 'en_US.UTF-8'

Regards,
Sunny




On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 7:39 PM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan at
club.fr> wrote:
> Le lundi 28 mars 2016 ? 19:16 +0530, Sunny Singha a ?crit :
>> Hi,
>> I think I'm experiencing an issue regarding system Locale. I have
>> exported '.csv' formatted data frames gathered from various
social
>> media platforms like facebook/twitter/G+, etc.
>>
>> I observe many variable/columns consists of strings formatted similar
to below:
>> "
>> "
>>
>> As expected and I confirmed, in social media data, they are strings in
>> different languages.
>> Platform details are provide in the end of this mail. OS locale is set
>> to English (United States) hence 'R' locale is
'English_United
>> States.1252'
>>
>> I have attempted to change it to UTF-8 but receives below warning
message:
>>
>> Warning message:
>> In Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "UTF-8") :
>>   OS reports request to set locale to "UTF-8" cannot be
honored
> You don't need to set the locale. Just pass an appropriate value (e.g.
> "UTF-8") to read.csv() or write.csv()'s fileEncoding
argument.
>
> You also didn't tell us what program you used to read these files. Some
> might guess the encoding incorrectly, or require you to choose it
> manually.
>
>
> Regards
>
>> I have gone through below forums but no resolution so far:
>> ---
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20571147/how-to-set-unicode-locale-in-r
>> --- https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067940.html
>> ---
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19877676/write-utf-8-files-from-r
>> --- https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
>> ---
http://withr.me/configure-character-encoding-for-r-under-linux-and-windows/
>>
>> I'm not sure whether the issue is while reading/extracting the data
>> from media or while writing/exporting in Windows directory, but I
>> don't experience similar issue in my personal Mac machine. I need
some
>> clarification here.
>>
>> How could I export the data just as I see on web ?  Please guide.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Sunny
>>
>> Platform I'm using::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
>> Operating System : Windows 7 Professional SP1
>> R version details:
>> platform       x86_64-w64-mingw32
>> arch           x86_64
>> os             mingw32
>> system         x86_64, mingw32
>> status
>> major          3
>> minor          2.3
>> year           2015
>> month          12
>> day            10
>> svn rev        69752
>> language       R
>> version.string R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
>> nickname       Wooden Christmas-Tree
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> 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.