iconv

R Base 3.6.2

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

Syntax

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

Arguments

Parameter	Description
`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?

Return 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 to is "latin1" or "UTF-8", or if to = "" and the current locale's encoding is detected as Latin-1 (or its superset CP1252 on Windows) or UTF-8. If toRaw = TRUE, the value is a list of the same length and the same attributes as x whose elements are either NULL (i

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 most platforms 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 supported 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 tran

Examples

Example

# NOT RUN {
## In principle, as 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")
# }
# 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")
# }