Cyrillic transliteration in R

Question

Are there packages for Cyrillic text transliteration to Latin in R? I need to convert data frames to Latin to use factors. It is somewhat messy to use Cyrillic factors in R.

Answer 1

I have found the package at last.

> library(stringi)
> stri_trans_general("женщина", "cyrillic-latin")
[1] "ženŝina"

> stri_trans_general("женщина", "russian-latin/bgn")
[1] "zhenshchina"

After that, the only issue remaining is the "ё" letter.

> stri_trans_general("Ёж", "russian-latin/bgn")
[1] "Yëzh"

> stri_trans_general("подъезд", "russian-latin/bgn")
[1] "podʺyezd"

> stri_trans_general("мальчик", "russian-latin/bgn")
[1] "malʹchik"

I had to remove all the "ё", "ʹ" and "ʺ" characters

> iconv(stri_trans_general("ёж", "russian-latin/bgn"),from="UTF8",to="ASCII",sub="")
[1] "yzh"

Or one can just remove the 'Ё' and 'ё' letters before

> gsub('ё','e',gsub('Ё','E','Ёжики на ёлке'))
[1] "Eжики на eлке"

or after transliteration.

Answer 2

It is possible to do it with stringi package as you above, but with different transform identifier, for Serbian latin:

`stri_trans_general("жшчћђ", "Serbian-Latin/BGN")`

All characters should be transformed correctly to Serbian latin.

Answer 3

If afterwards one uses Base R to filter the data in Cyrillic, one get's all NA's, but if dplyr is used then everything is fine.