[R] about opening R script Chinese annotation garble problem

[Bill Dunlap]

The answer depends on the encoding of the file containing the Chinese
characters and on the version of R (since you are using Windows).  I copied
your subject line into Wordpad and and added some syntax to make a valid R
expression
  s <- "永创 via R-help"
I then saved it with the type "Unicode Text Document".  In my version of
Wordpad this means UTF-16.  The bytes in the file are
  4.2.0> readBin("Chinese-utf-16.txt", what="raw",
n=file.size("Chinese-utf-16.txt"))
   [1] ff fe 73 00 20 00 3c 00 2d 00 20 00 22 00 38 6c 1b 52
  [19] 20 00 76 00 69 00 61 00 20 00 52 00 2d 00 68 00 65 00
  [37] 6c 00 70 00 22 00 0d 00 0a 00
All the nulls in the file are a hint that this is encoded using UTF-16, not
UTF-8.

With R-4.2.0 (released a few days ago) I can source the file with
  4.2.0> source("Chinese-utf-16.txt", encoding="UTF-16")
  4.2.0> s
  [1] "永创 via R-help"
  4.2.0> Encoding(s)
  [1] "UTF-8"

With R-4.1.2 I get
  > source("Chinese-utf-16.txt", encoding="UTF-16")
  Error in source("Chinese-utf-16.txt", encoding = "UTF-16") :
    Chinese-utf-16.txt:1:6: unexpected INCOMPLETE_STRING
  1: s <- "
           ^
  In addition: Warning message:
  In readLines(file, warn = FALSE) :
    invalid input found on input connection 'Chinese-utf-16.txt'
  > source(file("Chinese-utf-16.txt", encoding="UTF-16"))
  > s
  [1] "<U+6C38><U+521B> via R-help"
  > source(file("Chinese-utf-16.txt", encoding="UTF-16"), encoding="UTF-8")
  > s
  [1] "永创 via R-help"
  > Encoding(s)
  [1] "UTF-8"
  > charToRaw(s)
   [1] e6 b0 b8 e5 88 9b 20 76 69 61 20 52 2d 68 65 6c 70

R-4.2.0 makes this much easier.

-Bill

On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 1:04 AM 永创 via R-help <r-help using r-project.org> wrote:

> Garbled characters appear in Chinese annotation when opening program
> script using RGui (see attached picture). I use a variety of methods have
> not been solved, I hope to help me solve this problem. Thank you.
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