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Encoding problem when your package contains functions with non-english characters

I am building my own package, and I keep running into encoding issues because the functions in my package has non-english (non-ASCII) characters.

Inherently, Korean characters are a part of many of the functions in my package. A sample function:

library(rvest)
sampleprob <- function(url) {
  # sample url: "http://dart.fss.or.kr/dsaf001/main.do?rcpNo=20200330003851"
  result <- grepl("연결재무제표 주석", html_text(read_html(url)))
  return(result)
}

However, when installing the package I run into encoding problems.

I created a sample package (https://github.com/hyk0127/KorEncod/) with just one function (what is shown above) and uploaded it onto my github page for a reproducible example. I run the following code to install:

library(devtools)
install_github("hyk0127/KorEncod")

Below is the error message that I see

Error : (converted from warning) unable to re-encode 'hello.R' line 7
ERROR: unable to collate and parse R files for package 'KorEncod'
* removing 'C:/Users/myname/Documents/R/win-library/3.6/KorEncod'
* restoring previous 'C:/Users/myname/Documents/R/win-library/3.6/KorEncod'
Error: Failed to install 'KorEncod' from GitHub:
  (converted from warning) installation of package ‘C:/Users/myname/AppData/Local/Temp/RtmpmS5ZOe/file48c02d205c44/KorEncod_0.1.0.tar.gz’ had non-zero exit status

The error message about line 7 refers to the Korean characters in the function.

It is possible to locally install the package with tar.gz file, but then the function does not run as intended, because the Korean characters are recognized in broken encoding.

This cannot be the first time that someone has tried building a package that has non-english (or non-ASCII) characters, and yet I couldn't find a solution to this. Any help will be deeply appreciated.

A few pieces of info that I think are related:

Currently the DESCRIPTION file specifies "Encoding: UTF-8".

I have used sys.setlocale to set the locale into Korean and back to no avail. I have specified @encoding UTF-8 to the function to no avail as well.

I am currently using Windows where the administrative language is set to English. I have tried using a different laptop with Windows & administrative language set to Korean, and the same problem appears.

Solution

  • The key trick is replacing the non-ASCII characters with their unicode codes - the \uxxxx encoding.

    These can be generated via stringi::stri_escape_unicode() function.

    Note that since it will be necessary to completely get rid of the Korean characters in your code in order to pass the R CMD check it will be necessary to perform a manual copy & re-encode via {stringi} on the command line & paste back operation on all your R scripts included in the package.

    I am not aware of an available automated solution for this problem.

    In the specific use case of the example provided the unicode would read like this:

    sampleprob <- function(url) {
  # stringi::stri_escape_unicode("연결재무제표 주석") to get the \uxxxx codes
  result <- grepl("\uc5f0\uacb0\uc7ac\ubb34\uc81c\ud45c \uc8fc\uc11d", 
                  rvest::html_text(xml2::read_html(url)))
  return(result)
}
sampleprob("http://dart.fss.or.kr/dsaf001/main.do?rcpNo=20200330003851")
[1] TRUE

    This will be a hassle, but it seems to be the only way to make your code platform neutral (which is a key CRAN requirement, and thus subject to R CMD check).