How to knit2html with UTF-8 encoding?

Question

My .Rmd file contains multilingual text. When I load the html page produced by knit2html to my joomla site the multilingual text has been replaced by squares. Do you know of a way to request a utf-8 encoded html page, or any other way to overcome the problem?

Answer 1

Update:

RStudio (>= 0.97.x) and knitr (>= 1.2) know how to handle the file encoding now. RStudio will pass the file encoding to the encoding argument of knit() (e.g. knit('foo.Rmd', encoding = 'UTF-8')). In short, upgrading RStudio and knitr will solve the problem.

Please ignore the answer below; it is no longer an appropriate solution.

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I did it like this (using RStudio):

1. For the .Rmd I chose "Save with encoding" then I selected UTF-8
2. Before calling knit2html() I gave: options(encoding = 'UTF-8')

That did the trick