Different results from the same function when loaded in global environment vs in a package

Question

Problem

I am developing a simple package to learn R package development using this tutorial. For this purpose, I wrote a function and then tried it out within the global environment, and then provided it in the package. But I get different results while running the function in these two contexts.

Function

what_time <- function(language = "english") {

  if (!language %in% c("urdu", "english")) {
    stop("Either choose english or urdu as a language.")
  }

  time <- format(Sys.time(), "%H:%M")

  if (language == "urdu") {

    paste(time, "وقت ھوا ہے")

    } else if (language == "english"){

      sprintf("It is %s now!", time)
  }


}

Running the function in the global environment:

I created the above function definition in R console and then run the function:

what_time("urdu")
[1] "08:47 وقت ھوا ہے"

Running the function after loading the package:

Then I restarted the R session and did the following:

devtools::load_all()
i Loading umair
what_time("urdu")
[1] "08:47 <U+0648><U+0642><U+062A> <U+06BE><U+0648><U+0627> <U+06C1><U+06D2>"

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

It seems that 'special characters' are not supported in your self-made package. Check the values of Encoding in your package's DESCRIPTION file, and of Sys.getlocale(), Sys.getenv('LANG'), and Sys.getenv('LC_CTYPE') in your R session.

Which language you have there shouldn't matter much, but it should be a UTF-8 variant.

I am having no problems to produce the correct output on my own machine with the following settings:

File 'testpackage/DESCRIPTION'

...
Encoding: UTF-8
...

R(Studio) session

> Sys.getlocale()
[1] "en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8"

> Sys.getenv('LANG')
[1] "en_US.UTF-8"

> Sys.getenv('LC_CTYPE')
[1] "en_US.UTF-8"

To modify these settings:

Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", 'en_EN.UTF-8')
Sys.setenv("LANG" = "en_EN.UTF-8")
Sys.setenv("LC_CTYPE" = "en_EN.UTF-8")

RStudio Preferences

Preferences > Code > Saving > Default text encoding: UTF-8