Removing non-ASCII characters from data files
These days, a slightly better approach is to use the stringi package which provides a function for general unicode conversion. This allows you to preserve the original text as much as possible:
x <- c("Ekstr\u00f8m", "J\u00f6reskog", "bi\u00dfchen Z\u00fcrcher")
x
#> [1] "Ekstrøm" "Jöreskog" "bißchen Zürcher"
stringi::stri_trans_general(x, "latin-ascii")
#> [1] "Ekstrom" "Joreskog" "bisschen Zurcher"
To remove all words with non-ascii characters (borrowing code from @Hadley), you can use the package xfun
with filter
from dplyr
x <- c("Ekstr\u00f8m", "J\u00f6reskog", "bi\u00dfchen Z\u00fcrcher", "alex")
x
x %>%
tibble(name = .) %>%
filter(xfun::is_ascii(name)== T)
To simply remove the non-ASCII characters, you could use base R's iconv()
, setting sub = ""
. Something like this should work:
x <- c("Ekstr\xf8m", "J\xf6reskog", "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher") # e.g. from ?iconv
Encoding(x) <- "latin1" # (just to make sure)
x
# [1] "Ekstrøm" "Jöreskog" "bißchen Zürcher"
iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", sub="")
# [1] "Ekstrm" "Jreskog" "bichen Zrcher"
To locate non-ASCII characters, or to find if there were any at all in your files, you could likely adapt the following ideas:
## Do *any* lines contain non-ASCII characters?
any(grepl("I_WAS_NOT_ASCII", iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", sub="I_WAS_NOT_ASCII")))
[1] TRUE
## Find which lines (e.g. read in by readLines()) contain non-ASCII characters
grep("I_WAS_NOT_ASCII", iconv(x, "latin1", "ASCII", sub="I_WAS_NOT_ASCII"))
[1] 1 2 3