Write as CSV giving weird characters

Question

I am trying to write a dataframe as csv, which succeeds, but end up some fields with weird characters, Say for example 4.5×10−7 gives 4.5Ã—10âˆ’7 in the csv file. After doing few research I used fileEncoding as "Windows-1252", but that dint help. Here is a reproducible code

name <- c('John Doe','Peter Gynn','Jolie Hope')
valuename <- c("4.5×10−7", "0.0006", "0.345")
df <- data.frame(name,valuename)
write.csv(df, "/Desktop/test.csv", row.names=FALSE)

Can anyone help me with a proper encoding or an alternative to take care of that field?

Thats weird, In the csv file is the field 4.5×10−7 or 4.5Ã—10âˆ’7 ? — Gerg, Oct 23 '17 at 17:28
How are you viewing the CSV file? Perhaps your viewer doesn't support non-ASCII characters. What OS are you working on? Are you transferring the file between systems? — MrFlick, Oct 23 '17 at 17:31
@Gerg It is 4.5×10−7. I think there is an issue with your CSV file. — Santosh M., Oct 23 '17 at 17:33
@Santosh you are right. in textwrangler it shows as it is, but in excel its weird symbols — Gerg, Oct 23 '17 at 17:46

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 23 '17 at 18:35

3

Try to force the fileEncoding to use "UTF-8":

write.csv(df, "/Desktop/test.csv", row.names=FALSE, fileEncoding = 'UTF-8')

Your code works fine in my windows 7, but I already had similar problems on my ubuntu 16.04.

edited Oct 23 '17 at 18:35

pirs

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answered Oct 23 '17 at 17:44

brunoroquette

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Looks like when I open in Xcel these weird characters come, but in text wrangler it looks exactly what I wanted. – Gerg Oct 23 '17 at 17:50

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 23 '22 at 22:40

2

Using the readr package you can simply use:

readr::write_excel_csv(df, file)

Per the documentation this function "include[s] a UTF-8 Byte order mark which indicates to Excel the csv is UTF-8 encoded."

edited Mar 23 '22 at 22:40

Brenton M. Wiernik

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answered Mar 17 '22 at 17:48

Logit4Life

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Write as CSV giving weird characters

2 Answers2