German Umlaut characters in R markdown

Question

How can I display non-English characters in R-markdown? In an otherwise English document, I would like to render a single \'u\' with two dots (an \'umlaut\') on top

Answer 1

We can do one better than in @RHertel answer. While the explicit use of HTML markup works, it may restrict us to HTML output -- which is uncool.

Checking with the RStudio documentation you see that UTF-8 is already the default (though I did an extra 'File -> Save with Encoding' which just showed that it already was at UTF-8). Hence it is just a matter of entering proper unicode characters. Below is a little variation on the standard file RStudio creates:

---
title: "Encoding Demo"
author: "Dirk Eddelbüttel"
date: "2/27/2016"
output: html_document
---

## R Markdown

Herr Müller sagt: "Über den Wolken können Sonnenuntergänge besonders schön sein."

which results in the following HTML:

Answer 2

You can use standard HTML code for this. For example, the German letter ä can be displayed by placing the corresponding vowel after an ampersand sign, followed by uml;, i.e., ä.

Here's an example of a .Rmd file:

---
title: "Umlauts with Rmarkdown"
output: html_document
---

## This is a sentence with many umlaut characters:

Herr Müller sagt: "Über den Wolken können Sonnenuntergänge 
besonders schön sein."