[ESS] Emacs' coding system in R-help buffer.

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "gj" == gerald jean <gerald.jean at dgag.ca>
>>>>>     on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:44:14 -0500 writes:

    gj> Hello,

    gj> I am using ESS-5.7.1 from Emacs 22.3.1 on a 64-bit RedHat Linux server, R
    gj> 2.10.0, Splus 8.1.1

    gj> When I open a R-help buffer from a "*.r" buffer a new buffer is open and
    gj> the help, for the requested function, is displayed.  But some characters
    gj> are in a "hard to read" form for human eyes.  For example, the following is
    gj> a portion of the "history" help file.

    gj> #############################################################################################
    gj> max.show: the maximum number of lines to show. â\200\230Infâ\200\231 will
    gj> give all of
    gj> the currently available history.

    gj> reverse: logical. If true, the lines are shown in reverse order. Note:
    gj> this is not useful when there are continuation lines.

    gj> pattern: A character string to be matched against the lines of the
    gj> history

    gj> ...: Arguments to be passed to â\200\230grepâ\200\231 when doing the
    gj> matching.
    gj> ###########################################################################################

    gj> I am also using Splus for a long time, from ESS, on the same machine and
    gj> never had this sort of problem.  

Well, I think S+ (as it is finally called!) does not support
internationalization AFAIK (it may do, using Microsoft concepts
on Windows, but standard ones).

    gj> The coding-system for the R-help buffer
    gj> is:

    gj> Coding system for saving this buffer:
    gj> Not set locally, use the default.
    gj> Default coding system (for new files):
    gj> 1 -- iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)

    gj> Coding system for keyboard input:
    gj> nil
    gj> Coding system for terminal output:
    gj> u -- utf-8 (alias of mule-utf-8)

    gj> Defaults for subprocess I/O:
    gj> decoding: 1 -- iso-latin-1-unix

    gj> encoding: 1 -- iso-latin-1-unix

etc etc etc

The problem in such cases is that  Emacs and R do not agree
about the coding system to use.

The above indicates to me, that your Emacs configuration
is preferring iso-latin-1  in some ways,
and I know that R nowadays strongly prefers UTF-8 (Unicode),
of course all depending on the localization aka 'LOCALE' ...
which I know is typically UTF-8 on Redhat.

I think .. that Emacs 23.1  may solve such problems somewhat
automatically for you, but I don't know if you can easily
upgrade to that.
Otherwise, you should try to customize your Emacs 22.3 to prefer
Unicode (UTF-8) over ISO-latin-1 .

Alternatively, you change the locale before starting Emacs...

Can other Redhat users chime in?

Regards,
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich

    gj> Both for S+ and R the coding-systems are identical, I ran diff after saving
    gj> the corresponding coding-systems, no differences???

    gj> Any clues?  Thanks,

    gj> Gérald Jean
    gj> Conseiller senior en statistiques,
    gj> VP Planification et Développement des Marchés,
    gj> Desjardins Groupe d'Assurances Générales
    gj> télephone            : (418) 835-4900 poste (7639)
    gj> télecopieur          : (418) 835-6657
    gj> courrier électronique: gerald.jean at dgag.ca

    gj> "In God we trust, all others must bring data"  W. Edwards Deming



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