On Tue, 28 Jan 2014, Henrique wrote: Incidentally, why that line? 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