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".

---

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"

Answer 2

As a workaround, you can use intToUtf8() function:

# this causes errors (non-ASCII chars)
f <- function(symbol = "➛")

# this also causes errors in Rd files (non-ASCII chars)
f <- function(symbol = "\u279B")

# this is ok
f <- function(symbol = intToUtf8(0x279B))