Handling Special Characters E.G. Accents in R

handling special characters e.g. accents in R

You've read in a page encoded in UTF-8. if x is your column of names, use Encoding(x) <- "UTF-8".

Replace accented characters in R with non-accented counterpart (UTF-8 encoding)

The below answers are basically taken from elsewhere. The key is getting your unwanted_array in the right format. You might want it as a list:

unwanted_array = list(    'Š'='S', 'š'='s', 'Ž'='Z', 'ž'='z', 'À'='A', 'Á'='A', 'Â'='A', 'Ã'='A', 'Ä'='A', 'Å'='A', 'Æ'='A', 'Ç'='C', 'È'='E', 'É'='E',
'Ê'='E', 'Ë'='E', 'Ì'='I', 'Í'='I', 'Î'='I', 'Ï'='I', 'Ñ'='N', 'Ò'='O', 'Ó'='O', 'Ô'='O', 'Õ'='O', 'Ö'='O', 'Ø'='O', 'Ù'='U',
'Ú'='U', 'Û'='U', 'Ü'='U', 'Ý'='Y', 'Þ'='B', 'ß'='Ss', 'à'='a', 'á'='a', 'â'='a', 'ã'='a', 'ä'='a', 'å'='a', 'æ'='a', 'ç'='c',
'è'='e', 'é'='e', 'ê'='e', 'ë'='e', 'ì'='i', 'í'='i', 'î'='i', 'ï'='i', 'ð'='o', 'ñ'='n', 'ò'='o', 'ó'='o', 'ô'='o', 'õ'='o',
'ö'='o', 'ø'='o', 'ù'='u', 'ú'='u', 'û'='u', 'ý'='y', 'ý'='y', 'þ'='b', 'ÿ'='y' )

You can do this easily with iconv or chartr:

> iconv(string, to='ASCII//TRANSLIT')
[1] "Holmer"

> chartr(paste(names(unwanted_array), collapse=''),
paste(unwanted_array, collapse=''),
string)
[1] "Holmer"

Otherwise you have to loop through all of replacements because mapply or similar wouldn't account for symbols already replaced by previous gsub operations.:

# the loop:
out <- string
for(i in seq_along(unwanted_array))
out <- gsub(names(unwanted_array)[i],unwanted_array[i],out)

The result:

> out
[1] "Holmer"

Handling xts objects that contain special characters

The object names with special characters can be backquoted. Also, if there are NA values, specify the na.rm = TRUE along with na.action = NULL as aggregate can remove the whole row if there is NA in any of the columns

out <- aggregate(`CL=F`$`CL=F.Close`, list(format(index(`CL=F`), "%Y-%m")), 
mean, na.rm = TRUE, na.action = NULL)

-output

> head(out)

2000-08 32.54571
2000-09 33.87100
2000-10 32.97318
2000-11 34.26450
2000-12 28.35500
2001-01 29.26667
> tail(out)

2021-02 59.06105
2021-03 62.35739
2021-04 61.70381
2021-05 65.15700
2021-06 71.35273
2021-07 72.43048

RStudio: keeping special characters in a script

You don't say what OS you're using, but this kind of thing really only happens on Windows nowadays, so I'll assume that.

The problem is that Windows has a local encoding that is not UTF-8. It is commonly something like Latin1 in English-speaking countries. I'm not sure what encoding people use in German-speaking countries, if that's where you are. From the junk you saw, it looks as though you saved the file in UTF-8, then read it using your local encoding. The encodings for writing and reading have to match if you want things to work.

In RStudio you can try "Reopen with encoding..." and specify UTF-8, and you'll probably get your original back, as long as you haven't saved it after the bad read. If you did that, you've got a much harder cleanup to do.



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