[ESS] German umlaute in ESS, Emacs & R
svga at arcor.de
svga at arcor.de
Fri Aug 1 13:51:16 CEST 2008
I agree, using non-ASCII characters in variable names is a hassle. Unfortunately, these variable names are common in my working area. I find this issue interesting, because german umlauts as a value in a variable is no problem:
> g <- "Säge"; plot(1:10, ylab=g)
> g
[1] "Säge"
works, but
> ä <- 2
Error: unexpected input in "\201"
Btw.: I have no problems with these under Linux.
Best, Sven
----- Original Nachricht ----
Von: Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
An: enno_sandkasten at arcor.de
Datum: 31.07.2008 18:30
Betreff: Re: [ESS] German umlaute in ESS, Emacs & R
> >>>>> "es" == enno sandkasten <enno_sandkasten at arcor.de>
> >>>>> on Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:17:38 +0200 (CEST) writes:
>
> es> Hi list,
> es> I use GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2008-03-26 on
> Windows XP and ESS Version 5.3.7, both downloaded from
> http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/ressources/emacs/, and R version 2.7.1 for
> Windows.
>
> es> My problem is that Emacs cannot handle german umlaute as R variable
> names:
>
> >> ä <- 3
> es> Error: unexpected input in "\201"
>
> es> This does not occur in RGui.exe. I think this is more an emacs than
> ess problem, but maybe there are any suggestions.
>
> Yes, it seems an Emacs rather than ESS problem, also visible on
> Linux.
> I can reproduce the problem also by starting R from the *shell* (M-x
> shell) buffer, hence it's not related to ESS,
> but most probably related to how emacs uses the 'comint-*'
> functions to communicate with the "inferior" process.
> I see the problem in all cases (within Emacs),
> both when then emacs-input (and -output method of the process is set to
> utf-8 or iso-latin-1 respectively {C-x RET p ...;
> C-x RET C-h shows you the list} and both for my default unicode
> utf-8 locale and with the C locale.
>
> OTOH, I can use 'ä' in the emacs shell more less fine:
> I can use it for input, but it does not correctly render for
> output.
>
> $ touch ä << shows Umlaut
> $ ls -l ä << shows Umlaut
> -rw-r--r-- 1 maechler sfsstaff 0 Jul 31 18:25 ? << shows question mark
> "?" (
> $ . /u/sfs/adm/locale-deCH-UTF8.sh
> $ ls -l ä <
> -rw-r--r-- 1 maechler sfsstaff 0 Jul 31 18:25 ?
> $ echo BLA >> ä
> $ ls -l ä
> -rw-r--r-- 1 maechler sfsstaff 4 Jul 31 18:25 ?
>
>
> BTW: I would never use non-ASCII characters in variable names,
> but that's really a separate issue;
> and I can imagine people having "good" reasons to do so.
> Note that it *can* dangerous: I see different files created by
> 'touch ä' depending on the locale (ISO-latin-1 vs Unicode UTF-8)
>
>
> Martin
>
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