[R-lang] Re: writing Unicode files from R

[Lucien Carroll]

Hi,

To write a file in a particular encoding I found I needed to pass a
file connection with the specified encoding, rather than just the
filename.

> write.csv(pass.len,(con <- file("pass_len.csv", "w", encoding="UTF-8"))); close(con)

~Lucien

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Scott Jackson <scottuba@gmail.com> wrote:
> hi R-langers,
>
> Has anyone worked with getting Unicode *out* of R?  I've had some
> success getting Unicode that began life in an Excel doc, text file,
> etc. into R and getting R to display the Unicode characters (e.g.,
> Arabic, Cyrillic) in the GUI and in plots.  However, whenever I've
> wanted to manipulate some data that has some Unicode text and get it
> out of R into a file that could be then opened in Excel and read by
> humans, I've gotten stuck.  Using write.table() or write() or cat() or
> even writeClipboard() have all resulted in ASCII renderings of the
> Unicode (e.g., <U+0001>), which I can't manage to get back into their
> human-readable Unicode characters in Excel, Notepad, or other text
> editors.
>
> Note I'm not just interested in printing out a *rendering* of the
> Unicode output (like you might be able to get via a
> Sweave/LaTeX-generated PDF), but actually spit out a file from R that
> can be opened and worked with in Excel (or any other Unicode-reading
> program), in such a way that the Unicode is displayed correctly.
>
> My latest frustration is that I can get the Unicode to display in the
> Rgui, and if I literally highlight, copy & paste from the Rgui into
> Excel, it looks fine.  But that's not a workable solution for what I
> really want to do.  So it feels like I'm just one simple, obvious step
> away...
>
> anyone have any ideas/suggestions?
>
> thanks,
> -scott
>



-- 
Lucien S. Carroll
Graduate Student
UCSD Linguistics
http://ling.ucsd.edu/~lucien