I want to print a plus minus sign of the form ± into a string in R, so that I can place that string a table with kableextra
Here is the structure of the string :
x = paste0("first_string", 2, "±", 3, "second_string", collapse = "")
However I get the following output:
"first_string2\302\2613second_string"
what should I do to have the output:
"first_string2±3second_string"
I found that \302\261 is the encoding for ± in Octal Escape Sequence according to this website or this website
EDIT Here is the output of sessionInfo():
R version 3.5.0 (2018-04-23)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS 10.14
Matrix products: default
BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.5/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
locale:
[1] C
attached base packages:
[1] splines stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] bindrcpp_0.2.2 rms_5.1-2 SparseM_1.77 Hmisc_4.1-1 Formula_1.2-3
[6] lattice_0.20-35 blme_1.0-4 emmeans_1.2.4 lme4_1.1-18-1 Matrix_1.2-14
[11] multcomp_1.4-8 TH.data_1.0-8 MASS_7.3-49 mvtnorm_1.0-8 survminer_0.4.3
[16] survival_2.41-3 latex2exp_0.4.0 magick_1.9 cowplot_0.9.3 ggpubr_0.1.7
[21] magrittr_1.5 gridExtra_2.3 rcompanion_2.0.0 ggsignif_0.4.0 ggplot2_3.1.0
[26] chron_2.3-52 lubridate_1.7.4 dplyr_0.7.5 kableExtra_0.9.0 knitr_1.20
[31] broom_0.4.5
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] minqa_1.2.4 colorspace_1.3-2 class_7.3-14 modeltools_0.2-22
[5] rprojroot_1.3-2 estimability_1.3 htmlTable_1.12 base64enc_0.1-3
[9] rstudioapi_0.7 MatrixModels_0.4-1 manipulate_1.0.1 coin_1.2-2
[13] xml2_1.2.0 codetools_0.2-15 mnormt_1.5-5 nloptr_1.0.4
[17] km.ci_0.5-2 cluster_2.0.7-1 readr_1.1.1 compiler_3.5.0
[21] httr_1.3.1 backports_1.1.2 assertthat_0.2.0 lazyeval_0.2.1
[25] quantreg_5.36 acepack_1.4.1 htmltools_0.3.6 tools_3.5.0
[29] coda_0.19-1 gtable_0.2.0 glue_1.3.0 reshape2_1.4.3
[33] Rcpp_1.0.0 nlme_3.1-137 psych_1.8.4 lmtest_0.9-36
[37] stringr_1.3.1 rvest_0.3.2 polspline_1.1.13 zoo_1.8-2
[41] scales_1.0.0 hms_0.4.2 parallel_3.5.0 sandwich_2.4-0
[45] expm_0.999-2 RColorBrewer_1.1-2 yaml_2.1.19 BSDA_1.2.0
[49] KMsurv_0.1-5 EMT_1.1 rpart_4.1-13 latticeExtra_0.6-28
[53] stringi_1.2.4 nortest_1.0-4 e1071_1.6-8 checkmate_1.8.5
[57] boot_1.3-20 rlang_0.3.0.1 pkgconfig_2.0.1 evaluate_0.10.1
[61] purrr_0.2.5 bindr_0.1.1 labeling_0.3 htmlwidgets_1.2
[65] cmprsk_2.2-7 tidyselect_0.2.4 plyr_1.8.4 R6_2.3.0
[69] DescTools_0.99.25 multcompView_0.1-7 pillar_1.2.3 foreign_0.8-70
[73] withr_2.1.2 nnet_7.3-12 tibble_1.4.2 survMisc_0.5.5
[77] rmarkdown_1.10 grid_3.5.0 data.table_1.11.4 digest_0.6.18
[81] xtable_1.8-2 tidyr_0.8.1 stats4_3.5.0 munsell_0.5.0
[85] viridisLite_0.3.0
Locale settings control character sets for input and output. You have
locale:
[1] C
but if you want to print non-ASCII characters such as ±, you'll need something such as UTF-8. One example of how to accomplish this (which seems to have solved your issue per the comments) is
Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","en_US.UTF-8")
paste0("first_string", 2, "±", 3, "second_string", collapse = "")
which should output
[1] "first_string2±3second_string"
For further information, I'd check out the following sources as a starting point: