CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlr
geotheory
geotheory

Reputation: 23650

Writing html in R - character encoding issues

I want to output html from R, and am hitting issues with particular characters. To illustrate, a function:

output = function(str, fn){ sink(fn); cat(str); sink(); browseURL(fn) }
output("It's an apostrophe", 'good.html')

enter image description here

output("It’s a right single quote", 'bad.html')

enter image description here

Grateful for any tips towards a general solution that doesn't require ad-hoc character replacement.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 170

Answers (1)

Konrad Rudolph
Konrad Rudolph

Reputation: 545588

You did not specify an encoding in your HTML file, so the browser guesses — badly1. This is a general problem with text data, but for HTML there’s a simple solution: specify the encoding in the HTML; for instance:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
    </head>
    <body>
        It’s a right single quote
    </body>
</html>

… and write this text to a file as UTF-8:

output = function (str, filename) {
    file = file(filename, encoding = 'UTF-8')
    on.exit(close(file))
    cat(str, file = file)
    browseURL(filename)
}

1 Though it depends on a lot of factors: on my computer, your code happens to work.

Upvotes: 2

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