I am importing some shapefiles that have bilingual (English/French) province and territory names, which include some accented characters. I want to keep these accented characters, but they are currently being replaced with symbols. How can I do that?
One of the shapefiles I'm using can be downloaded here: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/alternative_alternatif.cfm?l=eng&dispext=zip&teng=lfsa000b21a_e.zip&k=%20%20%20158240&loc=//www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/geo/sip-pis/boundary-limites/files-fichiers/lfsa000b21a_e.zip
I have tried the following:
statdat_fsa <- terra::vect("C:/Users/me/Desktop/lfsa000b21a_e.shp", layer_options = "UTF-8")
and
statdat_fsa <- terra::vect("C:/Users/me/Desktop/lfsa000b21a_e.shp", encoding = "UTF-8")
Both of these produce the following error: Error in .local(x, ...) : unused argument (layer_options = "UTF-8").
I've then been converting these files using sf, and opening them in R for easier viewing.
fsa_sf <- sf::st_as_sf(statdat_fsa)#so I can see the attribute table
If you scroll down in this table, you can quickly see the PRNAME entries where special characters have replaced accented ones. How can I get R to accept these accented characters instead of replacing them with symbols?
terra assumes "UTF-8", but this file appears to be "latin1" encoded (per dog's answer). You can specify that with opts="ENCODING=LATIN1".
v <- terra::vect("lfsa000b21a_e.shp", opts="ENCODING=LATIN1")
as.data.frame(v[93])
# CFSAUID DGUID PRUID PRNAME LANDAREA
#1 B3N 2021A0011B3N 12 Nova Scotia / Nouvelle-Écosse 7.5457