NOTE "marked UTF-8 string in data" should be addressed

[dankelley]

Although I had clean checks prior to CRAN submission, I am seeing at

https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_oce.html

that some machines running the R-devel version are producing

Check: data for non-ASCII characters
Result: NOTE
     Note: found 1 marked UTF-8 string 

so I want to fix that up.

[dankelley]

Here's how I located the problem. First, I moved all the data/*.rda files to another directory. Then, I started adding files back into data, doing

tools:::.check_package_datasets(".")

after every move. This can be done in a bisection sort of way, to avoid having to do it once per each file.

I found that the culprit is data/xbt.rda.

[dankelley]

I suspect the problem is that the file from which data/xbt.rda is created (which is create_data/xbt/xbt.edf) has a degree sign in line 34, quoted next.

Depth (m) - Temperature (°C) - Sound Velocity (m/s)

but, actually, it could also be in the dashes that are in the file, since they can cause problems sometimes.

I will look further into the file, and then I'll fix up the code.

[dankelley]

An aside: I am aware that this is similar to #1211 but I am recording my steps here as well.

[dankelley]

I'm trying to dredge up some memory of dealing with encodings in R (bad memories!) and below is a scent of the trail

> l<-readLines("create_data/xbt/xbt.edf",encoding="UTF-8")
> bad<-which(is.na(iconv(l,"UTF-8","UTF-8")))
> l[bad+seq(-1,1)]
[1] "//"                                                      
[2] "Depth (m) - Temperature (<U+00B0>C) - Sound Velocity (m/s)"
[3] "4.7 20.91 1575.30"                                       
> 
> l<-readLines("create_data/xbt/xbt.edf",encoding="latin1")
> bad<-which(is.na(iconv(l,"UTF-8","UTF-8")))
> l[bad+seq(-1,1)]
[1] "//"                                                    
[2] "Depth (m) - Temperature (<b0>C) - Sound Velocity (m/s)"
[3] "4.7 20.91 1575.30"                                     
> 

[dankelley]

Oh, I see. The problem is that we are storing the header, and it contains the funny character

> xbt <- read.xbt("create_data/xbt/xbt.edf")
> which(is.na(iconv(xbt@metadata$header,"UTF-8","UTF-8")))
[1] 34
> xbt@metadata$header[34]
[1] "Depth (m) - Temperature (<U+00B0>C) - Sound Velocity (m/s)"
> 

[dankelley]

This is done now in "develop" commit ff03b72
and the docs for the function point out how we are altering @metadata$header.