How to source() .R file saved using UTF-8 encoding?

On R/Windows, source runs into problems with any UTF-8 characters that can't be represented in the current locale (or ANSI Code Page in Windows-speak). And unfortunately Windows doesn't have UTF-8 available as an ANSI code page--Windows has a technical limitation that ANSI code pages can only be one- or two-byte-per-character encodings, not variable-byte encodings like UTF-8.

This doesn't seem to be a fundamental, unsolvable problem--there's just something wrong with the source function. You can get 90% of the way there by doing this instead:

eval(parse(filename, encoding="UTF-8"))

This'll work almost exactly like source() with default arguments, but won't let you do echo=T, eval.print=T, etc.

I think the problem lies with R. I can happily source UTF-8 files, or UCS-2LE files with many non-ASCII characters in. But some characters cause it to fail. For example the following

danish <- function() print("Skønt H. C. Andersens barndomsomgivelser var meget fattige, blev de i hans rige fantasi solbeskinnede.")
croatian <- function() print("Dodigović. Kako se Vi zovete?")
new_testament <- function() print("Ne provizu al vi trezorojn sur la tero, kie tineo kaj rusto konsumas, kaj jie ŝtelistoj trafosas kaj ŝtelas; sed provizu al vi trezoron en la ĉielo")
russian <- function() print ("Американские суда находятся в международных водах. Япония выразила серьезное беспокойство советскими действиями.")

is fine in both UTF-8 and UCS-2LE without the Russian line. But if that is included then it fails. I'm pointing the finger at R. Your Chinese text also appears to be too hard for R on Windows.

Locale seems irrelevant here. It's just a file, you tell it what encoding the file is, why should your locale matter?

We talked about this a lot in the comments to my previous post but I don't want this to get lost on page 3 of comments: You have to set the locale, it works with both input from the R-console (see screenshot in comments) as well as with input from file see this screenshot:

The file "myfile.r" contains:

russian <- function() print ("Американские с...");

The console contains:

source("myfile.r", encoding="utf-8")
> Error in source(".....
Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE","ru")
> [1] "Russian_Russia.1251"
russian()
[1] "Американские с..."

Note that the file-in fails and it points to the same character as the original poster's error (the one after "R). I can not do this with Chinese because i would have to install "Microsoft Pinyin IME 3.0", but the process is the same, you just replace the locale with "chinese" (the naming is a bit inconsistent, consult the documentation).