如何在Mac的RStudio上获取汉字中的有效编码输出？

Question

We are cleansing some marketing data in traditional Chinese. We found R can read UTF-8 traditional Chinese variable names without any problem. However, we can not get valid UTF-8 output there. For example,

If we command: unique(rframe$性別)

This is what we got: [1] "\女" "\男"

In which 性別 is "gender," \女 means female (女), and \男 means male (男).

The most interesting thing is R on the Linux platform generates the valid UTF-8 Chinese output if we use the same UTF-8 CSV file. Why does the same RStudio, which can generate Chinese output encoding in UTF-8 on the Linux platform successfully, cannot output valid UTF-8 Chinese output on the Mac system?

This very troublesome issue has been there for a long while. In fact, in the older RStudio version, we could get valid UTF-8 output. Can any friend help us?

Much obliged.

Chandler

Answer 1

The error may be in the import of the data. How did you import your data?

I tried by importing some data with Chinese characters and using specifically encoding="UTF-8" and I don't have any issues.

So my first suggestion is to try this:

data <-read.csv("mydata.csv", encoding="UTF-8", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

---

An additional approach could be to specify your variables as characters. According to following answer . So you get the Chinese character instead of the unicode.

as.character(unique(rframe$性別))

---

If you provide an excerpt from the data, I can check and possibly confirm this.

Answer 2

After a few trials and errors, we found this issue probably coming from the process of generating the R application on Mac.

We downloaded R from Git and compile an application, thru the Apple clang version 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.29, Target: x86_64-apple-darwin19.6.0), from source code. It works fine. Our troublesome issue does not emerge again. We reported to R society our findings today. We hope people can see a quick response soon.

The following message is the report we sent to R.

To: Bug-Report-Request bug-report-request@r-project.org

Hi,

I am more of a system programmer that helps my friend (Chandler) use R to process Data. He has quite some trouble getting Chinese / Unicode output on the terminal. However, that only happens on Mac. I can't reproduce it on Linux.

I think something that might be wrong on R - Mac version. I re-compile R with the source code from GitHub, and I can't reproduce this issue. With the one download from the website, it can be reproduced, with failed rate 100%.

The details live in https://www.facebook.com/groups/RnRStudio/permalink/4555694011125386/

I think that's because the toolchain to compile R / MAC could be out of date.

If you can create a bug on Bugzilla and enable me to comment there, I won't need a Bugzilla account. Or if any of you can sponsor on this issue, that's even better.

Or I'll need a Bugzilla account.

Thank you!

Answer 3

This issue comes from a bug in R, version 4.0.4, source code. The UTF-8 code could not be displayed validly on both Windows and Mac. It is fixed on version 4.0.5.