Printing of precis() histograms on Windows

[bwiernik]

On Windows, R's longstanding limitations with printing UTF-8 characters means that the histograms are corrupted and render like <U+2581>.

rethinking::precis(cars)
#>        mean        sd 5.5%  94.5%
#> speed 15.40  5.287644    7 24.000
#> dist  42.98 25.769377   10 87.135
#>                                                                                              histogram
#> speed         <U+2582><U+2582><U+2583><U+2585><U+2587><U+2585><U+2587><U+2587><U+2581><U+2585><U+2581>
#> dist  <U+2582><U+2583><U+2585><U+2587><U+2583><U+2583><U+2582><U+2581><U+2581><U+2581><U+2581><U+2581>

^{Created on 2020-09-07 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

If the output is first converted with tibble::as_tibble() it prints correctly in an IDE that supports UTF-8 (e.g., RStudio).

The skimr::skim() function (https://github.com/ropensci/skimr) implements some similar methods from the pillar package to also print its histograms on Windows in compatible IDEs.

Do you think you could either implement a similar print method for precis objects to render correctly on Windows or at least provide an argument to suppress the histograms entirely?

[rmcelreath]

Try hist=FALSE.

[alessandro-gentilini]

@bwiernik I have similar problem with rmarkdown::render, and I am not in Windows :-). hist=FALSE solved my problem, yes the output is not so fancy but it's fine for me.

[drj2h3]

I have pasted this answer, which works well, from Issue #168. Props to Chris for an elegant solution! Worked for me on R Studio 1.1.456 using R with R x64 4.0.3:

chrisdissanayake commented on Apr 9, 2020
I had the same problem. I was going with ap53's suggestion, and the following thread gave me a clue to fix it.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44253848/skimr-cant-seem-to-produce-the-histograms

I type this line in rstudio source window.

Sys.setlocale(locale='Chinese')