Removing non-ASCII characters from data files

asciinon-ascii-charactersrunicode

I've got a bunch of csv files that I'm reading into R and including in a package/data folder in .rdata format. Unfortunately the non-ASCII characters in the data fail the check. The tools package has two functions to check for non-ASCII characters (showNonASCII and showNonASCIIfile) but I can't seem to locate one to remove/clean them.

Before I explore other UNIX tools, it would be great to do this all in R so I can maintain a complete workflow from raw data to final product. Are there any existing packages/functions to help me get rid of the non-ASCII characters?

Best Answer

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"
Related Topic