Rename Lithuanian alphabet in R

Question

I would like to rename() or combine() different speakers' names in the same observation. For example, I have a variable called "speaker" with several speakers' names with Lithuanian characters. When I try to put observations together in one name, it does not work when the name has Lithuanian alphabet characters. I guess that the alphabet is the problem because it works well with names without these Lithuan alphabet characters.

For example:

lithu_comb[lithu_comb$speaker == "Č. Juršėnas L Ų", ] <- "Č. Juršėnas"

lithu_comb <- lithu_comb[!(lithu_comb$speaker=="Ąž  Tė. T S  Ąžė K Ų    Ū  Ū.S  Ąžė  Ū  Į Ką  Ū       Žū Ė J     . Są  Įų Į  Ė   S  Ąš Į  Ų Ųų"

In the first one, I try to combine the observations because it is the same speaker, but the names are badly written. In the second case, I try to drop the observations because this is not a real speaker name.

The code does not work in both cases but works well with no Lithuanian alphabet.

Thank you very much for any feedback or advice, and sorry in advance if I made any mistake in the post.

Alberto

Answer 1

Solution: Update R to version 4.2.0 or later.

Older R versions in Windows cannot deal with many special characters since they do not yet support UTF-8 encoding. R versions 4.2.0 and later should have full support for UTF-8.

Therefore, this code runs fine on my windows machine:

lithu_comb <- data.frame(speaker = c("Č. Juršėnas L Ų", "Č. Juršėnas"))
lithu_comb[lithu_comb$speaker == "Č. Juršėnas L Ų", ] <- "Č. Juršėnas"

output:

      speaker
1 Č. Juršėnas
2 Č. Juršėnas

R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 22000)

Let us know if that solved your problem. If not, please share your session information

sessionInfo()