base (version 3.0.3)

iconv: Convert Character Vector between Encodings

Description

This uses system facilities to convert a character vector between encodings: the ‘i’ stands for ‘internationalization’.

Usage

iconv(x, from = "", to = "", sub = NA, mark = TRUE, toRaw = FALSE)
iconvlist()

Arguments

x

A character vector, or an object to be converted to a character vector by as.character, or a list with NULL and raw elements as returned by iconv(toRaw = TRUE).

from

A character string describing the current encoding.

to

A character string describing the target encoding.

sub

character string. If not NA it is used to replace any non-convertible bytes in the input. (This would normally be a single character, but can be more.) If "byte", the indication is "" with the hex code of the byte.

mark

logical, for expert use. Should encodings be marked?

toRaw

logical. Should a list of raw vectors be returned rather than a character vector?

Value

If toRaw = FALSE (the default), the value is a character vector of the same length and the same attributes as x (after conversion to a character vector).If mark = TRUE (the default) the elements of the result have a declared encoding if from is "latin1" or "UTF-8", or if from = "" and the current locale's encoding is detected as Latin-1 or UTF-8.If toRaw = TRUE, the value is a vector of the same length and the same attributes as x whose elements are either NULL (if conversion fails) or a raw vector.For iconvlist(), a character vector (typically of a few hundred elements).

Implementation Details

There are three main implementations of iconv in use. Linux's C runtime glibc contains one. Several platforms supply GNU libiconv, including OS X, FreeBSD and Cygwin, in some cases with additional encodings. On Windows we use a version of Yukihiro Nakadaira's win_iconv, which is based on Windows' codepages. (We have added many encoding names for compatibility with other systems.) All three have iconvlist, ignore case in encoding names and support //TRANSLIT (but with different results, and for win_iconv currently a ‘best fit’ strategy is used except for to = "ASCII"). Most commercial Unixes contain an implemetation of iconv but none we have encountered have supported the encoding names we need: the “R Installation and Administration Manual” recommends installing GNU libiconv on Solaris and AIX, for example. There are other implementations, e.g. NetBSD uses one from the Citrus project (which does not support //TRANSLIT) and there is an older FreeBSD port (libiconv is usually used there): it has not been reported whether or not these work with R. Note that you cannot rely on invalid inputs being detected, especially for to = "ASCII" where some implementations allow 8-bit characters and pass them through unchanged or with transliteration. Some of the implementations have interesting extra encodings: for example GNU libiconv allows to = "C99" to use \uxxx escapes for non-ASCII characters.

Details

The names of encodings and which ones are available are platform-dependent. All R platforms support "" (for the encoding of the current locale), "latin1" and "UTF-8". Generally case is ignored when specifying an encoding.

On many platforms, including Windows, iconvlist provides an alphabetical list of the supported encodings. On others, the information is on the man page for iconv(5) or elsewhere in the man pages (but beware that the system command iconv may not support the same set of encodings as the C functions R calls). Unfortunately, the names are rarely valid across all platforms.

Elements of x which cannot be converted (perhaps because they are invalid or because they cannot be represented in the target encoding) will be returned as NA unless sub is specified.

Most versions of iconv will allow transliteration by appending //TRANSLIT to the to encoding: see the examples.

Encoding "ASCII" is also accepted, and on most systems "C" and "POSIX" are synonyms for ASCII.

Any encoding bits (see Encoding) on elements of x are ignored: they will always be translated as if from from even if declared otherwise.

See Also

localeToCharset, file.

Examples

## In principle, not all systems have iconvlist
try(utils::head(iconvlist(), n = 50))

## Not run: 
# ## convert from Latin-2 to UTF-8: two of the glibc iconv variants.
# iconv(x, "ISO_8859-2", "UTF-8")
# iconv(x, "LATIN2", "UTF-8")
# ## End(Not run)

## Both x below are in latin1 and will only display correctly in a
## locale that can represent and display latin1.
x <- "fa\xE7ile"
Encoding(x) <- "latin1"
x
charToRaw(xx <- iconv(x, "latin1", "UTF-8"))
xx

iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII")          #   NA
iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", "?")     # "fa?ile"
iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", "")      # "faile"
iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", "byte")  # "fa<e7>ile"

## Extracts from old R help files (they are nowadays in UTF-8)
x <- c("Ekstr\xf8m", "J\xf6reskog", "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher")
Encoding(x) <- "latin1"
x
try(iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII//TRANSLIT"))  # platform-dependent
iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", sub = "byte")
## and for Windows' 'Unicode'
str(xx <- iconv(x, "latin1", "UTF-16LE", toRaw = TRUE))
iconv(xx, "UTF-16LE", "UTF-8")