Parse non-ASCII characters in StatsBomb player names

[JoGall]

Parse non-ASCII characters in StatsBomb (and other) data for use with soccerPosition and other future plotting functions. For example, Kylian Mbappé currently renders as Kylian Mbappé.

[Ryo-N7]

hey! was doing something similar at work so thought I might throw in a few functions that might help:

• tools package: showNonASCII() and showNonASCIIfile(), this is more for examining scripts and not data but might be useful
• textclean package: replace_non_ascii()
• stringi package: stri_trans_general(x, "latin-ascii") might be the best way to do it. Use it inside a mutate() to transform the column containing the player names!

x <- c(
    "Hello World", "6 Ekstr\xf8m", "J\xf6reskog", "bi\xdfchen Z\xfcrcher",
    'This is a \xA9 but not a \xAE', '6 \xF7 2 = 3', 
    'fractions \xBC, \xBD, \xBE', 'cows go \xB5', '30\xA2')

data.frame(thingy = x) %>% 
    mutate(thingy2 = stringi::stri_trans_general(thingy, "latin-ascii"))

[JoGall]

Thanks for this Ryo, super useful! Hopefully finally get round to fixing this today.