Hello this is my question:
I am currently working on an introductory course on R programming for people with zero background on programming (this is people studying biology, veterinary, medicine, economics, …), so they tend to be not very tech savvy and to use Windows. After they download and open the R scripts that I prepared, they are going to find every now and then badly encoded characters (as the course is in spanish and has many accents). This happens because my scripts are made with UTF-8 encoding and is not supported by default in Windows.
The options to avoid this nuisance are:
- change all my scripts to the encoding WINDOWS-1252
- instruct everyone to change their encoding to UTF-8
The first option is more annoying for me and helps prevents the students to be distracted with a quite minor detail.
The second option has no clear advantages from the pedagogic point of view, so I’d like to ask which virtues do you think it has…
Thanks in advance!
I would highly recommend instructing them to change their encoding to UTF-8. I’ve had the same issue on numerous occassions with web-app scripting and generally speaking it’s alot more hassle to go through the code than to instruct the customer (or in your case, student) to use the UTF-8 encoding.
Afterall the course you’re holding is an introductionary course, you might want to consider briefly covering the topic and explain the differences between the two – and more specifically: What happens when it doesn’t work?
You have a golden opportunity to save yourself some time later down road, and possibly avoid the “Why is there question marks all over my screen”-question altogether!