Exporting Arabic Text from R

Question

I'm trying to export a data frame with Arabic text in R.

When R imports Arabic text it converts it to UTF-8 codes. Like this:

     <U+0627><U+0644><U+0641><U+0631><U+0639> <U+0627><U+0644><U+062A><U+0634><U+0631><U+064A><U+0639><U+064A><U+060C> <U+0627><U+0644><U+0641><U+0631><U+0639> <U+0627><U+0644><U+062A><U+0646><U+0641><U+064A><U+0630><U+064A><U+060C><U+0627><U+0644><U+0641><U+0631><U+0639> <U+0627><U+0644><U+0642><U+0636><U+0627><U+0626><U+064A>. <U+0627><U+0644><U+062D><U+0643><U+0648><U+0645><U+0629> <U+0627><U+0644><U+0641><U+062F><U+0631><U+0627><U+0644><U+064A>

Unfortunately, I can't get it to turn back into readable Arabic when exporting. Below is code I'm using...

    write.csv(my.data,"data.csv", fileEncoding='UTF-8') 

Anybody have a solution?

Also, here is my session info.

R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] ggplot2_0.9.3.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] colorspace_1.2-2   dichromat_2.0-0    digest_0.6.3       grid_3.0.1   gtable_0.1.2      
[6] labeling_0.2       MASS_7.3-27        munsell_0.4.2      plyr_1.8           proto_0.3-10      
[11] RColorBrewer_1.0-5 reshape2_1.2.2     scales_0.2.3       stringr_0.6.2      tools_3.0.1       

Answer 1

This code worked with me so I am sharing it:

Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "arabic" )

write.csv(group$message, file = 'posts.txt', fileEncoding = "UTF-8")

If you save the file as csv it will not work. You have to save it as txt.

Answer 2

You'll have to install and use locales. It's difficult and sometimes doesn't work.

There's some solutions and code offered here: Writing data isn't preserving encoding

Keep in mind that you actually HAVE to install language packs for your operating system and for some Windows versions there aren't any available separately at all.