Special characters in R language

Question

I have a table, which looks like this:

1β              2β     
1.0199e-01        2.2545e-01       
2.5303e-01        6.5301e-01
1.2151e+00        1.1490e+00

and so on...

I want to make a boxplot of this data. The commands I am using is this:

pdf('rtest.pdf')
 w1<-read.table("data_CMR",header=T)
 w2<-read.table("data_C",header=T)
boxplot(w1[,], w2[,], w3[,],outline=FALSE,names=c(colnames(w1),colnames(w2),colnames(w3)))
dev.off()

The problem is instead of symbol beta (β), I get two dots (..) in the output.

Any suggestions, to solve this problem.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The suggestion to use check.names will prevent the appending of "X" to the "1β" and "2β" which would otherwise occur even once the encoding is sorted out (since column names are not supposed to start with numbers. (One could also have just used the"names" argument to boxplot.)

w1<-read.table(text="1β              2β     
 1.0199e-01        2.2545e-01       
 2.5303e-01        6.5301e-01
 1.2151e+00        1.1490e+00",header=TRUE, check.names=FALSE, fileEncoding="UTF-8")
boxplot(w1)

Answer 2

This also works

pdf('rtest.pdf')
w1<-read.table("data_CMR",header=T) 
w2<-read.table("data_C",header=T) 
one<-expression(paste("1", beta,sep="")) 
two <- expression(paste("2", beta,sep="")) 
boxplot(w1[,], w2[,], w3[,],outline=FALSE, names=c(one,two)) 
dev.off()