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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
6 years ago

Power BI Custom Visual in R problem with international characters

Hi

 

I am developing a Power BI Custom Visual R html. Everything works fine except when writing international characters like the norwegian letters æ ø å it looks terrible. It actually comes out in power bi desktop as Ã, in stead of ø and Ã| in stead of æ and so on. I have tried to search the community, but I haven't found any solution on this. It works nicely in RStudio, but when I run this code in visual code and create a pbiviz package command and then update the component in Power BI desktop the characters turn up as non character. The customers react badly on this and I hope somebody has a solution on this.

 

thanks and regards Geir

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6 Replies

  • lbendlin's avatar
    lbendlin
    Super User
    6 years ago

    That sounds like you use 1252 (Western) character set when you should be using 65001 (UTF-8)

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      6 years ago

      hi again I have added some more details about my case you responded. I can perhaps look at the new added information to see if there are anything you can look at.

       

      regards geir

      • lbendlin's avatar
        lbendlin
        Super User
        6 years ago

        I think you want to look at your source data. The encoding may already be broken at the source.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    6 years ago

    Here you can see my Power BI Custom Visual in R (plotly and ggplot2). The text you see under Values on the right should be seen in the legends part of the R html visual. It is ok in RStudio but when it is shown in Power BI Desktop, it has some terrible characters for the Norwegian special characters Ø Æ Å.

     

    I have tried to search the net for solutions. I have tried to put the character as unicode like \u00D8, but with no luck. I have tried put these lines in my code 

    ##########################

    libraryRequireInstall("ggplot2")
    libraryRequireInstall("plotly")
    libraryRequireInstall("readr")
    libraryRequireInstall("dplyr")
    libraryRequireInstall("scales")
    libraryRequireInstall("stringi")
    libraryRequireInstall("showtext")

    showtext.auto(enable = TRUE)
    Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","Norwegian") # Internationalization 
    #options(encoding = "UTF-8")   # <- This one makes it even worse
    ##########################
     
    I have also tried to the my variable as this:, but no luck
     columnNames[3] <- stri_encode(columnNames[3], "", "UTF-8")

     

    One thing I have discovered is that I ran into the same problem with other Custom R Visuals from Microsoft App Source. There must be something wrong in Power BI Desktop that corrupts these characters. I can't use Power Query since all come from the component. The customer is complaining of course 😞

     

    Is there any one out there that can explain to me what is wrong here

     

    regards Geir