R: Converting “special” letters into UTF-8?

Question

I run into problems matching tables where one dataframe contains special characters and the other doesn\'t. Example: Doña Ana County vs. Dona Ana County

Answer 1

The first problem is that acs::fips.place is badly mangled; if provides e.g., \\xf1a where it means \xf1a. A bug should be reported to the package mantainer. In the meantime, here is one work-around:

tbl_df(acs::fips.place) %>%
    mutate(COUNTY = scan(text = str_c(COUNTY, collapse = "\n"),
                         sep = "\n",
                         what = "character",
                         allowEscapes = TRUE)) -> fp

Encoding(fp$COUNTY) <- "latin1"

fp %>%
    filter(COUNTY == "Doña Ana County")

Once the escapes have been cleaned up you can transliterate non-ascii characters into ascii substitutions. The stringi package makes it easy:

library(stringi)
fp$COUNTY <- stri_trans_general(fp$COUNTY, "latin-ascii")

fp %>%
    filter(COUNTY == "Dona Ana County")