`fread` doesn't accept `encoding = "Windows-1252"`

[Kodiologist]

"Latin-1" is accepted (as documented), but presumably "Latin-1" here actually means Windows-1252, as it does in many cases, not ISO-8859-1. The correct name ought to be recognized.

[MichaelChirico]

I believe we're just following the read.csv behavior here:

https://rdrr.io/r/utils/read.table.html

This also follows advice in, e.g., WRE, that only specifically calls out latin1:

https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Character-encoding-issues

If you could point to any documentation backing you up here, and especially if you could show that we are inconsistent w.r.t. base behavior, that would be much appreciated.

[Kodiologist]

I didn't realize this was a problem throughout R core, to the extent that the internal enum value is CE_LATIN1. I shouldn't be that surprised, though.

If you could point to any documentation backing you up here

Are you asking for documentation that "Windows-1252" is a name for this encoding, that it's the correct name, or that "Latin-1" is ambiguous?

and especially if you could show that we are inconsistent w.r.t. base behavior

I can confirm that the name "Windows-1252" is recognized by e.g. file:

$ python3 -c 'with open("/tmp/foo.txt", "w", encoding = "Windows-1252") as o: o.write("“hello”\n")'
$ R --vanilla --slave -e 'readLines(file("/tmp/foo.txt", encoding = "Windows-1252"))'                                                                   
[1] "“hello”"

You can tell that R (and Python) aren't just using a funny name for ISO-8859-1 here because the characters “ and ” don't exist in ISO-8859-1.