From murdoch.duncan at gmail.com  Sat Jun 17 18:26:27 2017
From: murdoch.duncan at gmail.com (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2017 12:26:27 -0400
Subject: [Rd] suggestion to fix packageDescription() for Windows users
In-Reply-To: <6b7f9592-1a53-37dd-f8ae-fe805dcbc337@uw.edu>
References: <1d01ccce-cb18-30d9-9d93-644ed4dbd995@uw.edu>
 <70548b39-a0ee-80d5-302f-2433a700192d@gmail.com>
 <6b7f9592-1a53-37dd-f8ae-fe805dcbc337@uw.edu>
Message-ID: <7e843534-d9f2-9cac-1c53-7c2e8b687c39@gmail.com>

On 17/06/2017 9:13 AM, Ben Marwick wrote:
> Hi Duncan,
>
> Thanks for your reply. Yes, it does seem to be specific to the CTYPE
> setting to Chinese on Windows. If I set it to English using
> Sys.setlocale() there is no problem, then back to Chinese and the
> authors disappear:
>
> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","English")
> citation("readr")

Thanks, that makes the problem reproducible.  I'll submit it as a bug 
report.  Maybe someone from Microsoft will fix it.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> #' To cite package ?readr? in publications use:
> #'
> #'   Hadley Wickham, Jim Hester and Romain Francois (2017). readr: Read
> #' Rectangular Text Data. R package version 1.1.1.
> #' https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr
> #'
> #' A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
> #'
> #' @Manual{,
> #'   title = {readr: Read Rectangular Text Data},
> #'   author = {Hadley Wickham and Jim Hester and Romain Francois},
> #'   year = {2017},
> #'   note = {R package version 1.1.1},
> #'   url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr},
> #' }
>
>
> Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "Chinese")
> citation("readr")
>
> #'
> #' To cite package ?readr? in publications use:
> #'
> #'   (2017). readr: Read Rectangular Text Data. R package version 1.1.1.
> #' https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr
> #'
> #' A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
> #'
> #' @Manual{,
> #'   title = {readr: Read Rectangular Text Data},
> #'   year = {2017},
> #'   note = {R package version 1.1.1},
> #'   url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr},
> #' }
> #'
> #' ATTENTION: This citation information has been auto-generated from the
> #' package DESCRIPTION file and may need manual editing, see
> #' ?help("citation")?.
>
> Where do we go from here? I do want to use the Chinese locale with R on
> Windows (and perhaps others do too), so switching the locale isn't a fix.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ben
>
> On 17/06/2017 10:36 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 17/06/2017 7:10 AM, Ben Marwick wrote:
>>> Recently I was trying to cite a package where the authors have ?
>>> and ? in their names. I found that on Windows the citation() function
>>> did not return the authors' names at all, but on Linux there was no
>>> problem (sessionInfos at the bottom):
>>>
>>> On Windows, no author names are returned:
>>
>> I'm not seeing this.  You have fairly strange localization settings; see
>> comments below.
>>
>>>
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>>  > citation("readr")
>>>
>>> To cite package ?readr? in publications use:
>>>
>>>    (2017). readr: Read Rectangular Text Data. R package version 1.1.1.
>>>    https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr
>>>
>>> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
>>>
>>>    @Manual{,
>>>      title = {readr: Read Rectangular Text Data},
>>>      year = {2017},
>>>      note = {R package version 1.1.1},
>>>      url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr},
>>>    }
>>>
>>> ATTENTION: This citation information has been auto-generated from the
>>> package DESCRIPTION file and may need manual editing, see
>>> ?help("citation")?.
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>> On Linux we do see the author names:
>>>
>>> #---------------
>>>  > citation("readr")
>>>
>>> To cite package ?readr? in publications use:
>>>
>>>    Hadley Wickham, Jim Hester and Romain Francois (2017). readr:
>>>    Read Rectangular Text Data. R package version 1.1.1.
>>>    https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr
>>>
>>> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
>>>
>>>    @Manual{,
>>>      title = {readr: Read Rectangular Text Data},
>>>      author = {Hadley Wickham and Jim Hester and Romain Francois},
>>>      year = {2017},
>>>      note = {R package version 1.1.1},
>>>      url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr},
>>>    }
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>> This appears to be an OS-dependent encoding issue. The citation function
>>> does not take an encoding argument, so it's not possible to set the
>>> encoding at the point where that function is used. The citation function
>>> working with the packageDescription function, which does have an
>>> encoding argument, but the default is not useful for Windows when there
>>> is an encoding set in the DESCRIPTION of the package (in this case
>>> UTF-8).
>>>
>>> We can set the encoding argument in packageDescription so it works in
>>> Windows to give the authors as expected, but it is very inconvenient to
>>> generate citations directly from the output of this function. So I'd
>>> like to propose a solution this problem by changing one line in the
>>> packageDescription function, like so, from:
>>>
>>> #---------------
>>> if (missing(encoding) && Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE") == "C")
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>> to:
>>>
>>> #---------------
>>> if ((missing(encoding) && Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE") == "C") |
>>> unname(Sys.info()['sysname']) == "Windows")
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>> If I understand correctly, that will force ASCII//TRANSLIT encoding when
>>> DESCRIPTION files are read by packageDescription() on Windows machines.
>>> The upside is that Windows users will get the authors in the package
>>> citation, unlike the current situation. The downside is that the exotic
>>> symbols in the authors' names are replaced with common ones that are
>>> similar.
>>>
>>> I think getting the citations to easily include the authors' names is
>>> pretty important, even if their names have exotic characters, so this is
>>> worth fixing. Is this edit to packageDescription the best way to solve
>>> this problem of exotic characters preventing the authors' names from
>>> showing on Windows?
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>>
>>> Ben
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Windows sessionInfo
>>>
>>> #---------------
>>>  > sessionInfo()
>>> R version 3.4.0 Patched (2017-05-10 r72670)
>>> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
>>> Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1
>>>
>>> Matrix products: default
>>>
>>> locale:
>>> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252
>>> [2] LC_CTYPE=Chinese (Simplified)_People's Republic of China.936
>>> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252
>>> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
>>> [5] LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252
>>
>> I don't know what English_Australia.1252 does that's different from what
>> I use (English_Canada.1252), but the Chinese locale setting could cause
>> trouble.  Could you try setting this (presumably in the Windows control
>> panel) to be consistent?  You're using a much simpler setting on Linux.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>>
>>> attached base packages:
>>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>>
>>> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>>>   [1] readr_1.1.1    compiler_3.4.0 R6_2.2.1       hms_0.3
>>> tools_3.4.0
>>>   [6] tibble_1.3.3   yaml_2.1.14    Rcpp_0.12.11   knitr_1.16
>>> rlang_0.1.1
>>> [11] fortunes_1.5-4
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>> Linux sessionInfo:
>>>
>>> #---------------
>>>  > sessionInfo()
>>> R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21)
>>> Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
>>> Running under: Ubuntu 16.10
>>>
>>> locale:
>>>   [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
>>>   [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
>>>   [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
>>>   [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
>>>   [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
>>> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>>>
>>> attached base packages:
>>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>>
>>> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>>> [1] tools_3.3.1 yaml_2.1.14 knitr_1.16
>>> #---------------
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



[Rd] suggestion to fix packageDescription() for Windows users
Duncan Murdoch