UTF encoding and special characters during golem deployment

[mcsiple]

Hi Appsilon developers! I built an app using golem because I hope to publish it as an R package.

I am using live translation in the app via radioButtons. The .json file with my translations contains special characters. When I deploy the app from the R package to shinyapps.io , the version that publishes to the server does not display these special characters at all (notice how the í is missing from "vaya aquí"):

Special characters included in the app_ui.R file render as UTF on the server:

I am not sure if this is a golem issue or a shiny.i18n issue, but I am posting here because I am guessing other shiny.i18n users have similar issues. I have to keep both types (the .json contents and the in-app special characters) in order to allow translation for the radioButton options and the plots.

Here is the repo for the R package (everything works perfectly when the app is deployed from the package): https://github.com/mcsiple/mmrefpoints Here is the server version that deploys automatically when I use golem::add_shinyappsio_file(); rsconnect::deployApp(): https://msiple.shinyapps.io/mmrefpoints/

If I should post this on the golem github page instead, just let me know. And thank you in advance for your help.

[mcsiple]

I just noticed that this problem is specific to areas where I have chunks of raw HTML and where I have special characters in plot labels, so I don't think this is a shinyi18.n issue. I will leave it up for now just in case others have run into the same issue but am fairly sure the fix will not require any changes on your part.

[mcsiple]

I fixed this with an update where I saved all the .R files usign UTF-8 encoding (that was the system default, but I did it again anyway) and changed the raw HTML translations (accessed with switch() for use in the splash page) I converted UTF-8 characters to HTML, e.g., exploración --> exploración. Thank you, and hopefully someone else will benefit from this little code adventure.

[owen-cho]

Thanks @mcsiple , it was indeed helpful. So you used switch function inside your server instead of shiny.i18n translator. I managed to get it working this way, but wonder if you've done the same. Thanks!

[mcsiple]

Hi @owen-cho indeed, this is what I used. Here's an example code chunk for what those HTML pieces look like in my code:

In the constants file that loads before the app runs:

splash_es <- "<div class='jumbotron'>
  <h2>Bienvenido a la herramienta de exploraci&oacute;n de impactos de la captura incidental de mam&iacute;feros marinos</h2>
</div>"

In the server code:

 output$splash <- renderUI({
    htmltools::HTML(
      switch(input$selected_language,
        "en" = splash_en,
        "es" = splash_es,
        "fr" = splash_fr
      )
    )
  })

I hope this helps!

[owen-cho]

Thank you @mcsiple I did pretty much the same:

library(shiny)

ui <- fluidPage(
  actionButton("btn", "Welcome"),
  selectInput("lang", NULL, c("en", "kr"))
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  observeEvent(input$lang, {
    label <- switch(
      input$lang,
      en = "Welcome",
      kr = HTML("&#xd658;&#xc601;&#xd569;&#xb2c8;&#xb2e4;")
    )
    updateActionButton(inputId = "btn", label = label)
  })
}

shinyApp(ui = ui, server = server)