[R] How to set default encoding for sourced files

[Bert Gunter]

?options

options(encoding = "utf-8")
in a startup file or function should presumably do it. See ?Startup

Bert

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 7:34 AM Andrew Hart via R-help <r-help using r-project.org>
wrote:

> Hi there. I'm working with some utf-8 incoded csv files which gives me
> data frames with utf-8 encoded headers. This means when I write things like
> dat$proporción
> in an R script and then source it, I have to make sure the R script is
> incoded using utf-8 (and not latin1) and then I also have to explicitly
> tell R that the encoding is utf-8 every time I source the file, that is,
> I need to type
> source("sr.R", encoding="utf-8").
>
> Sure, I could eliminate accents and so forth from the headers by
> renaming the data frame columns, and I have done and do do this, but I
> shouldn't be required to do this just to avoid encoding issues.
> We're living in the 21st century and imho Unicode-based encodings should
> be the de facto standard these days. I'm aware that R is pretty clever
> and stores the encoding along with the string value in all character
> objects and then converts on the fly as necessary. However, Almost
> everything I work with is in utf-8 or ASCII (which is compatible with
> utf-8 anyway),
> so I'd like R to behave as though it does everything natively in utf-8
> so I don't have to worry about it.
> Is there something in Rprofile.site or the user Rprofile or an
> environment variable I can set or some other way to instruct R to always
> assume that input stream encodings will be utf-8  unless otherwise
> specified? This way, I would only ever have to supply an encoding or
> fileEncoding argument to specify "latin1" if I happ     en to encounter it.
>
> Many thanks,
> Andrew.
>
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