gsub in R with unicode replacement give different results under Windows compared with Unix?

Question

Running the following commands in R under Mac or Linux produces the expected result, that is the greek letter beta:

gsub(\"\", \"\\u         


        

Answer 1

Just to elaborate on @MrFlick's solution, you have to set the encoding after each time a string is processed by gsub, as in:

s <- "blahblah-blahblah-blahblah"
# setting the encoding here and not in the while loop will not fix the problem
{
while(grepl('',s)){
    newVal <- gsub('^.*.*$','"\\\\u\\1"',s)
    newVal <- eval(parse(text=newVal))
    cat(newVal,'\n')
    s <- gsub('^(.*)(.*)$',
              paste0('\\1',newVal,'\\2'),
              s)
    # setting the encoding here fixes the cross platform differences
    Encoding(s) <- 'UTF-8'
}
cat(s,'\n')
# setting the encoding here and not in the while loop will raise an error
}
Encoding(s)