Why do some Unicode characters display in matrices, but not data frames in R?

Question

For at least some cases, Asian characters are printable if they are contained in a `matrix`, or a `vector`, but not in a `data.frame`. Here is an example ``` q<-'天' q # Works # [1] "天" matrix(q) # Works # [,1] # [1,] "天" q2<-data.frame(q,stringsAsFactors=FALSE) q2 # Does not work # q # 1 q2[1,] # Works again. # [1] "天" ``` Clearly, my device is capable of displaying the character, but when it is in a `data.frame`, it does not work. Doing some digging, I found that the `print.data.frame` function runs `format` on each column. It turns out that if you run `format.default` directly, the same problem occurs: ``` format(q) # "" ``` Digging into `format.default`, I find that it is calling the internal `format`, written in C. Before I dig any further, I want to know if others can reproduce this behaviour. Is there some configuration of R that would allow me to display these characters within `data.frame`s? My `sessionInfo()`, if it helps: ``` R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16) Pla…

Accepted Answer

I hate to answer my own question, but although the comments and answers helped, they weren't quite right. In Windows, it doesn't seem like you can set a generic 'UTF-8' locale. You can, however, set country-specific locales, which will work in this case:

```
Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", locale="Chinese")
q2 # Works fine
#  q
#1 天
```

But, it does make me wonder why exactly `format` seems to use the `locale`; I wonder if there is a way to have it ignore the locale in Windows. I also wonder if there is some generic `UTF-8` locale that I don't know about on Windows.

Why do some Unicode characters display in matrices, but not data frames in R?

Solution

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