Handling Norwegian Characters (æ, ø, å) in R

locale encoding internationalization R programming

This post explains how you can set the locale in R to handle Norwegian characters (æ, ø, å) properly.

Øyvind Bugge Solheim https://www.oyvindsolheim.com (Institutt for samfunnsforskning (ISF))https://www.samfunnsforskning.no
2024-12-20

Introduction

This post was all wrong earlier. So I have rewritten it myself. Since “Bokmål” includes an “å”, the locale was reverted to “C” by Rstudio. To make it work on a computer that has Norwegian Bokmål as the system language you have to specify the type of UTF-8 without the word “bokmål”.1. Thus the correct specification to work if you write in Norwegian is:

Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "NO_NB.utf8")
[1] "LC_COLLATE=NO_NB.utf8;LC_CTYPE=NO_NB.utf8;LC_MONETARY=NO_NB.utf8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=NO_NB.utf8"

For more information in Norwegian see here on my home page.

Put it in the startup of R

To make it standard you can put it in the r-profile. You open the profile:

#install.packages("usethis")

usethis::edit_r_profile()

And enter the locale:

Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "NO_NB.utf8")
[1] "LC_COLLATE=NO_NB.utf8;LC_CTYPE=NO_NB.utf8;LC_MONETARY=NO_NB.utf8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=NO_NB.utf8"

  1. I learned this here: https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/15008↩︎

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Solheim (2024, Dec. 20). Solheim: Handling Norwegian Characters (æ, ø, å) in R. Retrieved from https://www.oyvindsolheim.com/library/Norwegian characters/

BibTeX citation

@misc{solheim2024handling,
  author = {Solheim, Øyvind Bugge},
  title = {Solheim: Handling Norwegian Characters (æ, ø, å) in R},
  url = {https://www.oyvindsolheim.com/library/Norwegian characters/},
  year = {2024}
}