rlang (version 0.2.1)

as_utf8_character: Coerce to a character vector and attempt encoding conversion

Description

Unlike specifying the encoding argument in as_string() and as_character(), which is only declarative, these functions actually attempt to convert the encoding of their input. There are two possible cases:

• The string is tagged as UTF-8 or latin1, the only two encodings for which R has specific support. In this case, converting to the same encoding is a no-op, and converting to native always works as expected, as long as the native encoding, the one specified by the LC_CTYPE locale (see mut_utf8_locale()) has support for all characters occurring in the strings. Unrepresentable characters are serialised as unicode points: "<U+xxxx>".

• The string is not tagged. R assumes that it is encoded in the native encoding. Conversion to native is a no-op, and conversion to UTF-8 should work as long as the string is actually encoded in the locale codeset.

When translating to UTF-8, the strings are parsed for serialised unicode points (e.g. strings looking like "U+xxxx") with chr_unserialise_unicode(). This helps to alleviate the effects of character-to-symbol-to-character roundtrips on systems with non-UTF-8 native encoding.

Usage

as_utf8_character(x)
as_native_character(x)
as_utf8_string(x)
as_native_string(x)

Arguments

x

An object to coerce.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
# Let's create a string marked as UTF-8 (which is guaranteed by the
# Unicode escaping in the string):
utf8 <- "caf\uE9"
str_encoding(utf8)
as_bytes(utf8)

# It can then be converted to a native encoding, that is, the
# encoding specified in the current locale:
# }
# NOT RUN {
mut_latin1_locale()
latin1 <- as_native_string(utf8)
str_encoding(latin1)
as_bytes(latin1)
# }