

This is before you even go onto consider the Cyrillic languages and other script based texts such as Arabic, which simply cannot be 'converted' to English. As others have pointed out, diacritics are there for a reason: they are essentially unique letters in the alphabet of that language with their own meaning / sound etc.: removing those marks is just the same as replacing random letters in an English word. Robert maybe a chance to send a pull request :)Īttempting to 'convert them all' is the wrong approach to the problem.įirstly, you need to understand the limitations of what you are trying to do.1 with apache common in my case: �� not convert to D.
A WITH UMLAUT CONVERTS TO CODE


colnames(df) <- gsub('^.','',colnames(df))īy the way, if you’re having trouble understanding some of the code and concepts, I can highly recommend “An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R”, which is the must-have data science bible. I simply removed the first three characters of the first column name. read.csv('file.csv', fileEncoding = 'UTF-8-BOM') The first one, just changing the fileEncoding parameter, doesn’t seem to work for everyone. However, text editors might interpret this character as something else: namely . It is the byte order mark (or BOM) and it’s telling the computer that the characters that follow are encoded in Unicode. The first character is a magical character, invisible to the human eye, but readible by a computer. However, there’s a good reason why this happens.

Here’s something I used to bump in a lot when working with external files that I receive from clients: some gibberish prepended to the first column name of a data frame when using read.csv.
