How can I find out the internal code representation of a WINDOWS-1252 character?

Question

I am processing SPSS data from a questionnaire that must have originated in M$ Word. Word automatically changes hyphens into long hyphens, and gets converted into character

Answer 1

If you load the SPSS sav file via read.spss form package foreign, you could easily import the data frame with correct encoding via specifying the encoding like:

read.spss("foo.sav", reencode="CP1252")