Converting accents to ASCII in R

Question

I'm trying to convert special characters to ASCII in R. I tried using Hadley's advice in this question:

stringi::stri_trans_general('Jos\xe9', 'latin-ascii')

But I get "Jos�". I'm using stringi v1.1.1.

I'm running a Mac. My friends who are running Windows machines seem to get the desired result of "Jose".

Any idea what is going on?

Answer 1

The default encoding on Windows is different from the typical default encoding on other operating systems (UTF-8). x ='Jos\xe9' means something in Latin1, but not in UTF-8. So, on Linux or OS X you need to tell R what the encoding is:

x ='Jos\xe9'
Encoding(x) <- 'latin1'
stri_trans_general(x, 'Latin-ASCII')