Remove accents from a dataframe column in R

Question

I got a data.table base. I got a term column in this data.table

class(base$term)
[1] character
length(base$term)
[1] 27486

I'm able to remove accents from a string. I'm able to remove accents from a vector of string.

iconv("Millésime",to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
[1] "Millesime"
iconv(c("Millésime","boulangère"),to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
[1] "Millesime" "boulangere"

But for some reason, it does not work when I apply the very same function on my term column

base$terme[2]
[1] "Millésime"
iconv(base$terme[2],to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
[1] "MillACsime"

Does anybody know what is going on here?

Answer 1

Ok the way to solve the problem :

Encoding(base$terme[2])
[1] "UTF-8"
iconv(base$terme[2],from="UTF-8",to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
[1] "Millesime"

Thanks to @nicola

Answer 2

It might be easier to use the stringi package. This way, you don't need to check the encoding beforehand. Furthermore stringi is consistent across operating systems and inconv is not.

library(stringi)

base <- data.table(terme = c("Millésime", 
                             "boulangère", 
                             "üéâäàåçêëèïîì"))

base[, terme := stri_trans_general(str = terme, 
                                   id = "Latin-ASCII")]

> base
           terme
1:     Millesime
2:    boulangere
3: ueaaaaceeeiii

Answer 3

You can apply this function

    rm_accent <- function(str,pattern="all") {
   if(!is.character(str))
    str <- as.character(str)

  pattern <- unique(pattern)

  if(any(pattern=="Ç"))
    pattern[pattern=="Ç"] <- "ç"

  symbols <- c(
    acute = "áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚýÝ",
    grave = "àèìòùÀÈÌÒÙ",
    circunflex = "âêîôûÂÊÎÔÛ",
    tilde = "ãõÃÕñÑ",
    umlaut = "äëïöüÄËÏÖÜÿ",
    cedil = "çÇ"
  )

  nudeSymbols <- c(
    acute = "aeiouAEIOUyY",
    grave = "aeiouAEIOU",
    circunflex = "aeiouAEIOU",
    tilde = "aoAOnN",
    umlaut = "aeiouAEIOUy",
    cedil = "cC"
  )

  accentTypes <- c("´","`","^","~","¨","ç")

  if(any(c("all","al","a","todos","t","to","tod","todo")%in%pattern)) # opcao retirar todos
    return(chartr(paste(symbols, collapse=""), paste(nudeSymbols, collapse=""), str))

  for(i in which(accentTypes%in%pattern))
    str <- chartr(symbols[i],nudeSymbols[i], str) 

  return(str)
}