Troubleshooting: Printing UTF-8 (Russian) in R-markdown, knitr

This markdown file shows the problem experienced when trying to print (show) charater variables with UTF-8 / Russian encoding, discussed here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48307007/printing-utf-8-russian-characters-in-r-rmd-knitr

Note a file .Rprofile, which contains one line Sys.setlocale(“LC_CTYPE”, “russian”) has been placed in working directory.

library(knitr)
print(sessionInfo())

## R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
## Running under: Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS: /opt/R/3.4.0/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so
## LAPACK: /opt/R/3.4.0/lib/R/lib/libRlapack.so
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] knitr_1.20
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] compiler_3.4.0  backports_1.1.1 magrittr_1.5    rprojroot_1.2  
##  [5] tools_3.4.0     htmltools_0.3.6 yaml_2.1.18     Rcpp_0.12.13   
##  [9] stringi_1.1.7   rmarkdown_1.9   stringr_1.3.0   digest_0.6.12  
## [13] evaluate_0.10.1

#Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "en_US.UTF-8")

Here is a simple variable and a data.frame with this variable:

nameInRussian <- c("Борис Немцов")
nameInEnglish <- c("Boris Nemtsov")

dt <- data.frame(
name=c("Борис Немцов","Martin Luter King"),
year=c("2015","1968") 
)

Here’s what you get when you try to print (show) them in your markdown document:

nameInRussian

## [1] "Борис Немцов"

print(nameInRussian)

## [1] "Борис Немцов"

#cut(nameInRussian)

print(nameInRussian, encoding = "UTF-8")

## [1] "Борис Немцов"

print(enc2utf8(nameInRussian))

## [1] "Борис Немцов"

dt; 

##                name year
## 1      Борис Немцов 2015
## 2 Martin Luter King 1968

dt[1,1]

## [1] Борис Немцов
## Levels: Martin Luter King Борис Немцов

Note that using kable(dt) allows to print the table correctly. However printing just the variable itself does not work.

kable(dt)

name	year
Борис Немцов	2015
Martin Luter King	1968

kable(dt$name[1])

x
Борис Немцов

kable(dt[1,1])

x
Борис Немцов

The following references (Google “UTF-8, R”) were consulted, but did not help

# how to UTF-8 to 1251 in R
# https://tomizonor.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/file-utf8-windows/
# https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/all-about-unicode-utf8-character-sets
# http://blog.rolffredheim.com/2013/01/r-and-foreign-characters.html