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 of it. It is the correct spelling for 'u' in the name 'Muller.'

Thanks, I just tried `M\"uller` and `M \"u ller` , and `\"u` on its own line, and unfortunately it does not work. — ClarPaul, Feb 27 '16 at 15:28
See this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26821326/how-can-i-write-special-characters-in-rmarkdown-latex-documents — Xiongbing Jin, Feb 27 '16 at 15:39
It all works if you "just" enter the proper Unicode character. See the answer I just added. — Dirk Eddelbuettel, Feb 28 '16 at 02:22

score 15 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 28 '16 at 02:21

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:

Any experience with how the german 'Umlaute' can be pushed to the Rmarkdown if the text (ie the word containing the Umlaut) is part of a text in a data.frame or more precisely a tibble row/cell? — GWD, Mar 24 '19 at 14:32

RHertel · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-27T16:23:33.153

12

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 M&uuml;ller sagt: "&Uuml;ber den Wolken k&ouml;nnen Sonnenunterg&auml;nge 
besonders sch&ouml;n sein."

edited Feb 27 '16 at 16:23

answered Feb 27 '16 at 16:06

RHertel

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5

That seems suboptimal. I think you want encoding. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Feb 28 '16 at 02:07
Since v1 of RStudio you can insert unicode characters in source files, even on Windows. – Phil Feb 07 '17 at 11:12

German Umlaut characters in R markdown

2 Answers2

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