Non-english letters in dataframe

Question

I have a problem with handling non english letters in data frame. I want to change the column names, but function dplyr::rename(colName1 = śśś) shows error and informs that this column does not exist.

This is just example. I know, I could rename the columns in different way.

I tried to change default encoding in global options to UTF-8 however it doesn't help.

This works for me ```tibble(śśś = "") %>% dplyr::rename(colName1 = śśś)```. Try ```colnames(df)``` and add it here. There may be whitespace in the name. — Anurag N. Sharma, May 04 '20 at 09:26
can you share the output of dput(head(df)) for better reproducibility? — rj-nirbhay, May 04 '20 at 09:27
@NirbhaySingh Ok, so this helped to localize the problem. the output shows `sss`.I tried to create mock df but still nonEnglish characters are converted into english. So as I understand the R do not process nonenglish letters in this case. (The previous df was from imported .csv). I guess I should update language pack but don't exactly know how to do it. — haphap32, May 04 '20 at 09:42
@haphap32 this might be helpful https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13575180/how-to-change-language-settings-in-r — rj-nirbhay, May 04 '20 at 09:46

Chris Ruehlemann · Answer 1 · 2020-05-04T15:21:55.557

It's not quite clear to me what the problem is. If what you want is to change a non-ASCII column name into an ASCII name you can do that by matching the non-ASCII name with regex:

Reproducible data:

df <- data.frame(
  NY = c("some", "data", "more", "data"),
  śśś = c("some", "data", "more", "data")
)

To change the non-ASCII name to, say, Whatever, use grepl to match [^ -~], a character class ([...]) to exclude (^) any ASCII character (-~) and thus match non-ASCII characters such as, for example, ś but also Greek letters, Chinese characters, Arabic letters, Umlaut, and so on:

colnames(df)[grepl("[^ -~]", colnames(df))] <- "Whatever"

Result:

df
    NY Whatever
1 some     some
2 data     data
3 more     more
4 data     data

Non-english letters in dataframe

1 Answers1