How can I find out the internal code representation of a WINDOWS-1252 character?

Question

I am processing SPSS data from a questionnaire that must have originated in M$ Word. Word automatically changes hyphens into long hyphens, and gets converted into characters that don't display properly, i.e. "-" turns into "ú".

My question: What is the equivalent to utf8ToInt() in the WINDOWS-1252 character set?

utf8ToInt("A")
[1] 65

When I do this with my own data, I get an error:

x <- str_sub(levels(sd$j1)[1], 7, 7)
print(x)
[1] "ú"

utf8ToInt(x)
Error in utf8ToInt(x) : invalid UTF-8 string

However, the contents of x are perfectly usable in grep and gsub expressions.

> Sys.getlocale()
[1] "LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252"

Answer 1

If you load the SPSS sav file via read.spss form package foreign, you could easily import the data frame with correct encoding via specifying the encoding like:

read.spss("foo.sav", reencode="CP1252")

Answer 2

After some head-scratching, lots of reading help files and trial-and-error, I created two little functions that does what I need. These functions work by converting their input into UTF-8 and then returning the integer vector for the UTF-8 encoded character vector, and vice versa.

# Convert character to integer vector
# Optional encoding specifies encoding of x, defaults to current locale
encToInt <- function(x, encoding=localeToCharset()){
    utf8ToInt(iconv(x, encoding, "UTF-8"))
}

# Convert integer vector to character vector
# Optional encoding specifies encoding of x, defaults to current locale
intToEnc <- function(x, encoding=localeToCharset()){
    iconv(intToUtf8(x), "utf-8",  encoding)
}

Some examples:

x <- "\xfa"
encToInt(x)
[1] 250

intToEnc(250)
[1] "ú"