CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rencoding
Mpizos Dimitris
Mpizos Dimitris

Reputation: 4991

About the use of Encoding function

I am using the following code for importing special characters in R:

Encoding(self$Data$Skills) <- "UTF-8"

But when I change the name of the column with:

colnames(self$Data) <- 'skills2'

and run again:

Encoding(self$Data$skills2) <- "UTF-8"

I have the following error:

Error in `Encoding<-`(`*tmp*`, value = "UTF-8") : 
a character vector argument expected

I do not understand why is this happening. Any idea? Additionally, the same is happening if I want to sample data from this dataframe. Using:

self$Data <- data.frame(df[sample(nrow(self$Data),dim(self$Data)[1]*samplePersentance),])

the column name changes and when i encoding function i got the same error.The data is imported using read.csv function.

Edit: Head of the data

                         Skills
1                          null
2                           "'"
3                  "'Fin Gaap'"
4 "'Knæ-igennem-hinanden-tr..."
5 "'Mønt-dans-på-knoerne-tr..."
6  "'Necessary knowledge of..."

> typeof(self$Data)
[1] "list"

> class(self$Data)
[1] "data.frame"

And to reproduce the error:

try1 <- structure(list(Skills = c("null", "\"'\"", "\"'Fin Gaap'\"", 
"\"'Knæ-igennem-hinanden-tr...\"", "\"'Mønt-dans-på-knoerne-tr...\"", 
"\"'Necessary knowledge of...\"")), .Names = "Skills", row.names = c(NA, 
6L), class = "data.frame")


Encoding(try1$Skills) <- 'UTF-8'
#the function runs normally
try2 <- data.frame(try1[sample(nrow(try1),floor(dim(try1)[1]*0.5)),])
colnames(try2) <- 'skills2'
Encoding(try2$skills2) <- 'UTF-8'
#the function output an error.

> typeof(try1$skills)
'character'
> typeof(try2$skills)
'intiger'

Upvotes: 1

Views: 7166

Answers (1)

Roland
Roland

Reputation: 132576

The problem is that data.frame with its default stringsAsFactors = TRUE turns the column into a factor:

try2 <- data.frame(try1[sample(nrow(try1),floor(dim(try1)[1]*0.5)),])
colnames(try2) <- 'skills2'
#'data.frame':  3 obs. of  1 variable:
#  $ skills2: Factor w/ 3 levels "\"'\"","\"'Fin Gaap'\"",..: 3 1 2

str(try2)
Encoding(try2$skills2) <- 'UTF-8'
#Error in `Encoding<-`(`*tmp*`, value = "UTF-8") : 
#  a character vector argument expected

try2$skills2 <-as.character(try2$skills2)
Encoding(try2$skills2) <- 'UTF-8'
#works

Of course you don't need data.frame in that line at all ...

Upvotes: 2

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