How to use a non-ASCII symbol (e.g. £) in an R package function?

Question

I have a simple function in one of my R packages, with one of the arguments symbol = \"£\":

formatPound <- function(x, digits = 2, nsmall = 2         


        

Answer 1

Looks like "Writing R Extensions" covers this in Section 1.7.1 "Encoding Issues".

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One of the recommendations in this page is to use the Unicode encoding \uxxxx. Since £ is Unicode 00A3, you can use:

formatPound <- function(x, digits=2, nsmall=2, symbol="\u00A3"){
  paste(symbol, format(x, digits=digits, nsmall=nsmall))
}


formatPound(123.45)
[1] "£ 123.45"