Question

I made a function that removes en and em dashes. Great! But when I try to upload it to github and then re-install as a package something happens to the function. It replaces the dashes with some gobly gook characters. That usually means unicode stuff. I want to be able to export the function.

I tried replacing \\– with \u2013 and 0x2013. Also played with fixed and perl arguments. No luck.

Here’s:

1. the function that works
2. a test case
3. how it looks after I import it back in

Code:

#What I exported
incomp <- function (text.var){
    x <- gsub("\\–", "|", x)
    x <- gsub("\\—", "|", x)
    return(x)
}

#here it is in action working well
x <- c("I like...", "well?.", "–", "—")
incomp(x)

#[1] "I like..." "well?."    "|"  "|"   #what I look like (ain't I pretty?)

#what the exported function looks like when the package compiles
incomp <- function (text.var){   
    x <- gsub("[–]", "|", x)
    x <- gsub("[—]", "|", x)
    return(x)
}

#I don't work anymore
x <- c("I like...", "well?.", "(–", "—")   #I'm broken
incomp(x)

A search for r and unicode brings up lots of information but I can’t seem to apply it to my situation correctly.

The unicodes are:

• u2013 for the en dash
• u2014 for the em dash

This post is cross posted at talkstats.com. I generally do not cross post but am under the gun to get this out. I will link the two threads. LINK TO THE TALKSTATS THREAD

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The default when exporting locale of R are set to “C” I guess. Your locale maybe different.
Perhaps you can use Sys.setlocale in your package?