When I use write.csv for my Japanese text, I get gibberish in Excel (which normally handles Japanese fine). I've searched this site for solutions, but am coming up empty-handed. Is there an encoding command to add to write.csv to enable Excel to import the Japanese properly from R? Any help appreciated! Thanks!
3 Answers
As a work around -- and diagnostic -- have you tried saving as .txt and then both opening the file in Excel and also pasting the data into Excel from a text editor?
I just ran into this exact same problem - I used what I saw online:
write.csv(merch_df, file = "merch.reduced.csv", fileEncoding = "UTF-8")
and indeed, when opening my .xls file, <U+30BB><U+30D6><U+30F3>, etc.... Odd and disappointing.
A little Google and I found this awesome blog post by Kevin Ushey which explains it all... https://kevinushey.github.io/blog/2018/02/21/string-encoding-and-r/
Using the function he proposes:
write_utf8 <- function(text, f = tempfile()) {
# step 1: ensure our text is utf8 encoded
utf8 <- enc2utf8(text)
# step 2: create a connection with 'native' encoding
# this signals to R that translation before writing
# to the connection should be skipped
con <- file(f, open = "w+", encoding = "native.enc")
# step 3: write to the connection with 'useBytes = TRUE',
# telling R to skip translation to the native encoding
writeLines(utf8, con = con, useBytes = TRUE)
# close our connection
close(con)
# read back from the file just to confirm
# everything looks as expected
readLines(f, encoding = "UTF-8")
}
works magic. Thank you Kevin!
I ran into the same problem as tchevrier. Japanese text were not display correctly both in Excel and a text editor when exporting with write.csv. I found using:
readr::write_excel_csv(df, "filename.csv")
corrected the issue.
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