Re: [Gretl-users] R & Gretl: Accented file names problem
On Tue, 28 Jan 2014, Henrique wrote:
I think I found a problem with accented path or directory names
using R and Gretl. Look at the simple code:
<hansl>
nulldata 1
Incidentally, why that line?
# Works fine when the directory has
# no accented filename ("Teste")
foreign=R
nome_da_serie <-
file("C:/Users/henrique/Documents/gretl/Teste/Nome.txt")
nome_da_serie <- readLines(nome_da_serie, n = 1)
nome_da_serie
end foreign
# Doesn't work when the directory
# has accented filename ("Téstê")
# Gretl freezes
foreign=R
nome_da_serie <-
file("C:/Users/henrique/Documents/gretl/Téstê/Nome.txt")
nome_da_serie <- readLines(nome_da_serie, n = 1)
nome_da_serie
end foreign
# Doesn't work when the file
# doesn't exist ("Name.txt")
# Gretl freezes
foreign=R
nome_da_serie <-
file("C:/Users/henrique/Documents/gretl/Teste/Name.txt")
nome_da_serie <- readLines(nome_da_serie, n = 1)
nome_da_serie
end foreign
</hansl>
Using the commands directly on R works fine.
This works fine in both cases on Linux or Mac, because everyone is
talking the same language (well, encoding): gretl, R, and the
operating system all speak UTF-8.
I suspect that what's happening on Windows is this:
1) You type the accented characters in gretl's script editor, which
is a GTK widget and always uses UTF-8.
2) Gretl ships out your UTF-8 encoded "foreign" lines to R.
3) R tries tries to open your file using a UTF-8 encoded path and
fails because Windows doesn't do UTF-8.
If that's right, I don't think there's anything we can do about it.
Here's the problem. If gretl wants to open a file itself, based on
a name typed into the script editor, it knows that it may have to
recode the path on Windows (ugh, boo!) and is prepared for that
eventuality. But if gretl is shipping "foreign" lines out to another
program, we don't know what those lines mean (we don't and can't
parse them) and we really have no idea if it would make sense to
recode them to the Windows locale.
Moral: don't try to use non-ASCII characters in a gretl "foreign"
block on MS Windows unless you happen to know that the target
program will handle UTF-8 properly.
Allin