How do I display Chinese text properly in R Studio?

Question

I'm Chinese, and deal with Chinese characters frequently. I still can't find a way to properly encode Chinese.

The best way so far is read.csv(file_name, fileEncoding = "UTF8"). But when I list all the files in the wd using dir(), it comes up garbled:

> dir()
[1] "16PF.csv"       "codebook.html"  "Table_2.xls"   
[4] "win-library"    "鏈牎鏂囩.csv" "鏈牎鏂囩.R"

This is after I set the system locale:

> Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "chs") #cht for traditional Chinese, etc.
[1] "LC_COLLATE=Chinese_People's Republic of China.936;LC_CTYPE=Chinese_People's Republic of China.936;LC_MONETARY=Chinese_People's Republic of China.936;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Chinese_People's Republic of China.936"

In Global Options -> Code -> Saving, the default encoding is set to UTF8.

I also wish to make R Studio read Chinese text, without having to use a command every time I open it.

Update：the method provided by @niki is good for simple text reading: https://imgur.com/a/6XtwmzC

However, I need to deal with Chinese characters in data frames.

I just discovered that read.csv(file_name, fileEncoding = "UTF8") actually doesn't work:

> grades=read.csv("grades.csv",fileEncoding="UTF-8")
Warning messages:
1: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
  invalid input found on input connection 'grades.csv'
2: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
  incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'grades.csv'

Unless I set the system locale:

> Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","Chinese")
[1] "LC_COLLATE=Chinese (Simplified)_China.936;LC_CTYPE=Chinese (Simplified)_China.936;LC_MONETARY=Chinese (Simplified)_China.936;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Chinese (Simplified)_China.936"
> grades=read.csv("grades.csv",fileEncoding="UTF-8")
> head(grades[,c(3,6,8)],3)
  文理类型 学生类型 数学
1     文科     应届  138
2     文科     应届  134
3     文科     应届  119

Because it's cumbersome to set system locale every time I start R Studio, I tried to put Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","Chinese") in Rprofile, but it didn't seem to work.

Update 2: I seem to have located the wrong RProfile file. It has now been resolved.

How do I display Chinese text properly in R Studio?

0 Answers0