as_utf8_character
Coerce to a character vector and attempt encoding conversion
Description
Unlike specifying the encoding argument in as_string() and
as_character(), which is only declarative, these functions
actually attempt to convert the encoding of their input. There are
two possible cases:
-
The string is tagged as UTF-8 or latin1, the only two encodings for which R has specific support. In this case, converting to the same encoding is a no-op, and converting to native always works as expected, as long as the native encoding, the one specified by the
LC_CTYPElocale has support for all characters occurring in the strings. Unrepresentable characters are serialised as unicode points: "<U+xxxx>". -
The string is not tagged. R assumes that it is encoded in the native encoding. Conversion to native is a no-op, and conversion to UTF-8 should work as long as the string is actually encoded in the locale codeset.
When translating to UTF-8, the strings are parsed for serialised
unicode points (e.g. strings looking like "U+xxxx") with
chr_unserialise_unicode(). This helps to alleviate the effects of
character-to-symbol-to-character roundtrips on systems with
non-UTF-8 native encoding.
Usage
as_utf8_character(x)
Arguments
x |
An object to coerce. |
Examples
# Let's create a string marked as UTF-8 (which is guaranteed by the # Unicode escaping in the string): utf8 <- "caf\uE9" Encoding(utf8) as_bytes(utf8)