Cannot interpret scandinavian letters

[andreasft]

Hi,
After updating R and Rstudio, I am no longer able to read files containing Scandinavian letters (æ,ø,å).

I have a folder "New Folder" that includes the following files and folders:

Setting working directory to this folder should allow me to access it's subfolders through Rstudio. However, the special characters are not rendered correctly, and I am not able to access files or folders with these characters.

setwd("C:/Users/andreas/OneDrive - PRIO/Documents/New folder/")
list.files()
[1] "Følkr" "Følkr.txt" "Folkr" "Folkr.txt"
setwd("C:/Users/andreas/OneDrive - PRIO/Documents/New folder/Følkr")
list.files()
character(0)

This has not been a problem before, and I see some signs of others having similar problems:

RStudio can't deal with file names with unicode characters

Good news! I don't have admin rights but I've put in a request to IT to try your solution, fingers crossed.

Can't use utf-8 variable names in RStudio console

Hi, I am running Chinese Win10. I have no problem on regular R console (running inside cmd.exe) to use Chinese characters in a variable name: 吴 <- 'abc' but the same statement running inside RStudio IDE shows: Error: invalid multibyte character in parser at line 1 the same statement runs fine in a RScript windows inside IDE. so it's purely a problem with console in IDE.. I have confirmed encoding in my project options is UTF-8. I can't find relavent options in Global Options to set console encoding to utf-8

Any suggestion would be most welcome. Thanks.

sessionInfo()
R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
system code page: 65001

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.1.2 generics_0.1.1 tools_4.1.2 Rcpp_1.0.8 cellranger_1.1.0 lubridate_1.8.0 grid_4.1.2 readxl_1.3.1

[DavoWW]

Hi @andreasft,
Welcome to the RStudio Community Forum.

Maybe the details in this link may help:
https://www.r-bloggers.com/2013/01/r-and-foreign-characters/.

There are also some other things to try in this post:
https://forum.posit.co/t/issues-with-french-text-showing-up-incorrectly-in-r-script-in-rstudio/59896

[andreasft]

I tried all solutions mentioned. Same problem persist. Only in the most recent version of Rstudio (2021.09.2 Build 382). I will downgrade Rstudio.

The curious thing is that when using R-Rgui, everything works fine. So this is clearly a Rstudio issue. Many users are reporting the same issue across the message board.

Here is the RGui output for same code:

setwd("c:/users/andreas/OneDrive - PRIO/Documents/New folder/")
list.files()
[1] "Folkr" "Følkr" "Folkr.txt" "Følkr.txt"
setwd("c:/users/andreas/OneDrive - PRIO/Documents/New folder/Følkr")
list.files()
[1] "Folkr.txt" "Følkr.txt"

R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.1.2

[andreasft]

I downgraded to RStudio 2021.09.1+372 "Ghost Orchid" Release (8b9ced188245155642d024aa3630363df611088a, 2021-11-08) for Windows
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtWebEngine/5.12.8 Chrome/69.0.3497.128 Safari/537.36

Now it is working as expected. So clearly something with the most recent 09.2 version. This information in sessionInfo is what differs: "system code page: 65001"

Session info and code:
R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.1.2 generics_0.1.1 tools_4.1.2 Rcpp_1.0.8 cellranger_1.1.0 lubridate_1.8.0 grid_4.1.2 readxl_1.3.1

setwd("c:/users/andreas/OneDrive - PRIO/Documents/New folder/")
dir()
[1] "Folkr" "Følkr" "Folkr.txt" "Følkr.txt"

setwd("c:/users/andreas/OneDrive - PRIO/Documents/New folder/Følkr")
list.files()
[1] "Folkr.txt" "Følkr.txt"

[fontafox]

As i wrote in the other thread:

I have the same problem since I updated to the latest version or R-Studio.

My workaround is to change work directory before running the list.files command, then re-set my real working directory again.

setwd(datadir)
fileslist <- list.files(pattern = "xxx", recursive = TRUE)
setwd(workdir)

Still this is a pretty annoying issue since it forces me to modify code that has been working for years now.
Not the only issue connected to the latest update.

[LoB]

I can report the exact same problem. However, creating the folders with the letters å, ä, or ö from within RStudio works fine. But saving and loading from the folders is not possible.

dir.create("fold_ö")          # Creating folder works fine
var <- 1:10
save(object = var, file = "fold_ö/var.RData")
# Manually move file to fold_ö
load("fold_ö/var.RData")

R version: 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
RStudio version: 2021.09.2+382 "Ghost Orchid" for Windows
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32

Since my University’s OneDrive file path includes the letter “ö”, this is really troublesome for me

[LoB]

Maybe you guys already know this, but it seems like downgrading and workarounds aren’t necessary anymore. This issue is fixed in the latest daily version ("Ghost Orchid" 2021.09.3+385 by the time of writing this).

Cheers!