# R: Convert Character Vector between Encodings

iconv {base} | R Documentation

## Convert Character Vector between Encodings

### Description

This uses system facilities to convert a character vector between encodings: the ‘i’ stands for ‘internationalization’.

### Usage

    iconv(x, from ="", to = "", sub=NA)

    iconvlist()

### Arguments

`x` | A character vector, or an object to be converted to a character vector by `as.character`.
`from` | A character string describing the current encoding.
`to` | A character string describing the target encoding.
`sub` | character string. If not `NA` it is used to replace any non-convertible bytes in the input. (This would normally be a single character, but can be more.) If `"byte"`, the indication is `"<xx>"` with the hex code of the byte.

### Details

The names of encodings and which ones are available (and indeed, if any are) is platform-dependent. On all systems that support `iconv` you can use `""` for the encoding of the current locale, as well as `"latin1"` and `"UTF-8"`.

On many platforms `iconvlist` provides an alphabetical list of the supported encodings. On others, the information is on the man page for `iconv(5)` or elsewhere in the man pages (and beware that the system command `iconv` may not support the same set of encodings as the C functions R calls). Unfortunately, the names are rarely common across platforms.

Elements of `x` which cannot be converted (perhaps because they are invalid or because they cannot be represented in the target encoding) will be returned as `NA` unless `sub` is specified.

Some versions of `iconv` will allow transliteration by appending `//TRANSLIT` to the `to` encoding: see the examples.

### Value

A character vector of the same length and the same attributes as `x` (after conversion).
The elements of the result have a declared encoding if `from` is `"latin1"` or `"UTF-8"`, or if `from = ""` and the current locale's encoding is detected as Latin-1 or UTF-8.

### Note

Not all platforms support these functions. See also `capabilities("iconv")`.

### See Also

`localeToCharset`, `file`.

### Examples

    utils::head(iconvlist(), n = 50)

    ## Not run:
    ## convert from Latin-2 to UTF-8: two of the glibc iconv variants.
    iconv(x, "ISO_8859-2", "UTF-8")
    iconv(x, "LATIN2", "UTF-8")
    ## End(Not run)

    ## Both x below are in latin1 and will only display correctly in a
    ## latin1 locale.
    x <- "fa\xE7ile"
    Encoding(x) <- "latin1"
    x
    charToRaw(xx <- iconv(x, "latin1", "UTF-8"))
    xx

    iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII")          #   NA
    iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", "?")     # "fa?ile"
    iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", "")      # "faile"
    iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", "byte")  # "fa<e7>ile"

    # Extracts from R help files
    x <- c("Ekstr\xf8m", "J\xf6reskog", "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher")
    Encoding(x) <- "latin1"
    x
    try(iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII//TRANSLIT"))
    iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", sub="byte")

[Package base version 2.6.0 Index]