Hello there. I'm having a error message that I can't understand.

[Luddy]

When I try to install any package, or run any library, this error message is returning:

Error in nchar(homeDir) : invalid multibyte string, element 1

Can someone help me? I tried to find the solution in the internet, but I couldn't

[andresrcs]

We need more information to help you, which operating system are you using? What R version you have installed? Do you have non-ASCII characters in your package library path or in your HOME directory? Can you show a complete console output of an specific example?

[Luddy]

I'm using Windows 10.

My version of R is the lastest version.

I don't know what are "non-ASCII characters", but some packages that was usualy used, return this error.

I will show a example:

install.packages("nortest")
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

RTools: Toolchains for building R and R packages from source on Windows
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/Usuário/AppData/Local/R/win-library/4.2’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.2/nortest_1.0-4.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 38650 bytes (37 KB)
downloaded 37 KB

package ‘nortest’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
C:\Users\Usuário\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmpk1GqbH\downloaded_packages
Error in nchar(homeDir) : invalid multibyte string, element 1

The last string, return the error. I have no ideia how to fix it.

[andresrcs]

@Luddy

á

This would be a non-ASCII character. In theory R 4.2 should support utf8 encoding now but I think you need to change some encoding configuration on Windows for that to work, I haven't tested this myself so I can't give any specifics, hopefully someone else that has already tried would help you.

[Luddy]

Oh. So, it maybe will work if I change the name of my files?

[andresrcs]

The non-ASCII character is in your home directory path, you would need to change the name of your Windows user's HOME folder.