change <f6> to swedish charactors and related ggplot geom_bar issues in R

Question

I have 2 issues related to Swedish characters. I am fetching data directly from MS SQL database. 1.could anyone gives me a hint how could i change the back to Swedish characters in R?

I use write.csv write the data out to csv then copy and paste those string here to make the df as follow

library(tidyverse)
library(ggplot2)
library(scales)

c <- c("c","u","m","j","c","u","m","j","c","u","m","j")
city <- c("G<f6>teborg", "Ume<e5>", "Malm<f6>", "J<f6>nk<f6>ping","G<f6>teborg", "Ume<e5>", "Malm<f6>", "J<f6>nk<f6>ping","G<f6>teborg", "Ume<e5>", "Malm<f6>", "J<f6>nk<f6>ping")
priority <- c(1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,2,3,3,2)
n_cust <- sample(50:1000, 12, replace=T)
df <- data.frame(c,city,priority,n_cust)

should be ö and is å

interesting enough. if i use the code as following:

dpri %>% group_by(kommun, artikel_prioritet) %>% 
  summarise(n_cust=n_distinct(kund_id),
            sum_sales=sum(p_sum_adj_sale),
            avg_margin=mean(pp_avg_margin),
            avg_pec_sales=mean(p_pec_sales)) %>% 
  arrange(desc(sum_sales)) %>% 
  head(20)%>% 
  ggplot(aes(x=reorder(kommun, sum_sales), y=sum_sales, 
  fill=factor(artikel_prioritet))) +
  geom_bar(stat='identity')+
  coord_flip()+
  scale_y_continuous(labels = comma)+
  facet_grid(.~ factor(artikel_prioritet), scales = "free")+
  theme(legend.position="none")

i got this error: Error in grid.Call(C_textBounds, as.graphicsAnnot(x$label), x$x, x$y, : invalid input 'Göteborg' in 'utf8towcs'

if I first put this head(20) into a variable ci. then use ggplot to plot ci

ggplot(ci,aes(x=reorder(kommun, sum_sales), y=sum_sales, fill=factor(artikel_prioritet))) + geom_bar(stat='identity')+
coord_flip()+ scale_y_continuous(labels = comma)+ facet_grid(.~ factor(artikel_prioritet), scales = "free")+
theme(legend.position="none")

I have bar chart without any city legend. then I print out ci, I got pic as follow:

then, I write the head(20) to a csv 'cityname.csv' then read.csv back to R use the same code to do the bar chart

ci <- read.csv("cityname.csv")

ggplot(ci,aes(x=reorder(kommun, sum_sales), y=sum_sales, fill=factor(artikel_prioritet))) + geom_bar(stat='identity')+
coord_flip()+ scale_y_continuous(labels = comma)+ facet_grid(.~ factor(artikel_prioritet), scales = "free")+
theme(legend.position="none")

I got the pic as follow:

we can see legends this time but see , this time. hope get some suggestions how could i fix the strings in Swedish and wondering suggestion is there any other way without write.csv and then read again still can get the bar chart fixed?

Thank you!

Paul Wildenhain Paul Wildenhain · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-19T14:13:01

I believe your issue is that R doesn't know how to interpret your character encoding. Try \u notation instead of <>, which denotes UTF-8 encoding in R

> city <- c("G\u00f6teborg", "Ume\u00e5", "Malm\u00f6", "J\u00f6nk\u00f6ping","G\u00f6teborg", "Ume\u00e5", "Malm\u00f6", "J\u00f6nk\u00f6ping","G\u00f6teborg", "Ume\u00f6", "Malm\u00f6", "J\u00f6nk\u00f6ping")
> Encoding(city)
 [1] "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8"
> head(city)
[1] "Göteborg"  "Umeå"      "Malmö"     "Jönköping" "Göteborg"  "Umeå"

EDIT: You asked a good follow up question about how to make this replacement programmatically. I have provided a solution for that as well below, using the tidyverse packages dplyr and stringr

> city <- c("G<f6>teborg", "Ume<e5>", "Malm<f6>", "J<f6>nk<f6>ping","G<f6>teborg", "Ume<e5>", "Malm<f6>", "J<f6>nk<f6>ping","G<f6>teborg", "Ume<f6>", "Malm<f6>", "J<f6>nk<f6>ping")
> city_df <- as.data.frame(city)

> special_character_replacements <- c("<f6>" = "\\u00f6", "<e5>" = "\\u00e5")
> city_df %>% 
    dplyr::mutate(city_fixed = 
        stringr::str_replace_all(city, special_character_replacements))

              city city_fixed
1      G<f6>teborg   Göteborg
2          Ume<e5>       Umeå
3         Malm<f6>      Malmö
4  J<f6>nk<f6>ping  Jönköping
5      G<f6>teborg   Göteborg
6          Ume<e5>       Umeå
7         Malm<f6>      Malmö
8  J<f6>nk<f6>ping  Jönköping
9      G<f6>teborg   Göteborg
10         Ume<f6>       Umeö
11        Malm<f6>      Malmö
12 J<f6>nk<f6>ping  Jönköping

change <f6> to swedish charactors and related ggplot geom_bar issues in R

1 Answers