Re: [Gretl-users] R (foreign language): non-Ascii chars in gretl.loadmat on Windows

On Mon, 27 Aug 2018, Sven Schreiber wrote: Now I have explored a bit. My test rig for R is in this form: <hansl> foreign language=R fname <- <UTF8_filename> file.info(fname) fconv <- iconv(fname, from="utf-8", to=<TO_ENCODING>) file.info(fconv) end foreign </hansl> And here's what I find: If <UTF8_filename> contains accented characters that are in my Windows' locale codepage (for example c-cedilla), and <TO_ENCODING> is just "" (empty string to indicate current locale), the second invocation of file.info() works OK, though not surprsingly the first one fails (actually, produces a bunch of NAs). If <UTF8_filename> contains out-of-codepage characters (I tried Greek), conversion to "" fails. Not surprising. In addition, iconv() with to="UTF16" fails. It seems to me this last is an R bug. The function iconvlist() shows that UTF16 is a valid target. The reported cause of failure is that the "UTF-8" string contains an embedded NUL character, which is impossible with valid UTF-8. So I don't know what would happen if one were able to pass a UTF16 representation of the filename to a function such as file.info(). But I suspect R suffers from the problem that gretl had before 2018b, namely that you can't access files that have out-of-codepage names (and whose names must therefore be given in UTF16). Allin