Displaying UTF-8 encoded Chinese characters in R

Question

I try to open a UTF-8 encoded .csv file that contains (traditional) Chinese characters in R. For some reason, R displays the information sometimes as Chinese characters, som

Answer 1

Not a bug, more a misunderstanding of the underlying type system conversions (the character type and the factor type) when constructing a data.frame.

You could start first with data <-read.csv("mydata.csv", encoding="UTF-8", stringsAsFactors=FALSE) which will make your Chinese characters to be of the character type and so by printing them out you should see waht you are expecting.

@nograpes: similarly x=c('中華民族');x; y <- data.frame(x, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) and everything should be ok.