Add support for Windows UTF-8 version of R

An experimental build of R using UTF-8 as native encoding on Windows has been released recently, and here is the instruction: https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/howto.html

I’m on Windows 10 20H2 and has set $LANG to zh_CN.UTF-8. After setting the codepage to 65001(UTF-8), the encoding in Rterm successfully switches to UTF-8, but the encoding in radian remains unchanged.

In most of the time the terminal and the graph can still handle CJK characters properly. But sometimes some messy codes show, like the red text in the screenshot.

I thought this issue came from Python itself, so I set $PYTHONUTF8 to 1 to force Python to use UTF-8, and ran python -m radian instead of radian. However it doesn’t work for radian. I also tried to directly change the encoding in radian, and then it crashed.

[Yunuuuu]

Only set LANG environment is not sufficient to make this work well, I must set locale manually by adding following code in my .Rprofile.

            # Set locale to utf8
            is_uft8_support <- grepl(
                "UTF-8|utf8", Sys.getenv("LANG"),
                ignore.case = TRUE, perl = TRUE
            ) &&
                R.version$major >= 4L &&
                R.version$minor >= 2.0
            if (is_uft8_support) {
                suppressWarnings(Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", Sys.getenv("LANG")))
            }

This is my radian version:

when use raw radian without setting above code in my .Rprofile, the R sessionInfo and l10n_info indicate UTF-8 encoding isn’t work. When we read file with special character using data.table::fread, some characters won’t be parsed correctly After setting locale, this works fine, and when we read file with special character using data.table::fread, special characters can be parsed successfully.

[SpecterShell]

Where is the .Rprofile in vscode? I am new to R, and have little idea as to where to configure it… Thanks in advance!

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\.Rprofile