R: Coerce to a character vector and attempt encoding conversion

as_utf8_character {rlang} | R Documentation

## Coerce to a character vector and attempt encoding conversion

### Description

Unlike specifying the `encoding` argument in `as_string()` and `as_character()`, which is only declarative, these functions actually attempt to convert the encoding of their input. There are two possible cases:

- The string is tagged as UTF-8 or latin1, the only two encodings for which R has specific support. In this case, converting to the same encoding is a no-op, and converting to native always works as expected, as long as the native encoding, the one specified by the `LC_CTYPE` locale has support for all characters occurring in the strings. Unrepresentable characters are serialised as unicode points: "<U+xxxx>".

- The string is not tagged. R assumes that it is encoded in the native encoding. Conversion to native is a no-op, and conversion to UTF-8 should work as long as the string is actually encoded in the locale codeset.

When translating to UTF-8, the strings are parsed for serialised unicode points (e.g. strings looking like "U+xxxx") with `chr_unserialise_unicode()`. This helps to alleviate the effects of character-to-symbol-to-character roundtrips on systems with non-UTF-8 native encoding.

### Usage

    as_utf8_character(x)

### Arguments

`x` | An object to coerce.

### Examples

    # Let's create a string marked as UTF-8 (which is guaranteed by the
    # Unicode escaping in the string):
    utf8 <- "caf\uE9"
    Encoding(utf8)
    as_bytes(utf8)

[Package rlang version 0.4.2 Index]