install_github fails, files with accents

[tdhock]

Hi @gaborcsardi I’m using remotes in my teaching, and I find it very useful in general! Thanks for your ongoing maintenance of this important package.

I wanted to demo installation of a package in a sub-directory of a github repository.
I expected the following should work, but I get an error

> remotes::install_github("tdhock/2026-01-aa-grande-echelle/demos/Rcpp-add-pkg@réf-issue")
Using GitHub PAT from the git credential store.
Downloading GitHub repo tdhock/2026-01-aa-grande-echelle@réf-issue
Error: Failed to install 'Rcpp.add' from GitHub:
  input string 61 is invalid
In addition: Warning message:
In gsub("[^/]", "", file_list) :
  unable to translate 'tdhock-2026-01-aa-grande-echelle-561a217/r+<ac>f+<ac>rences.org' to a wide string

In this github repo

• there is a valid R package in the demos/Rcpp-add-pkg sub-directory
• there are some valid files with accent marks in their names in other directories (not in the R package)

A work-around is to rename all of the files with accent marks in their names, but it definitely would be more convenient if install_github() could work in this case. Is that a change you would consider, please?
If not, I would suggest adding some documentation on ?install_github which mentions that this is not supported.
Thanks in advance!

[gaborcsardi]

This works for me, what's your OS, R version and default encoding?

[tdhock]

this is on windows 11. I’m not sure what is the default encoding?

> remotes::install_github("tdhock/2026-01-aa-grande-echelle/demos/Rcpp-add-pkg@réf-issue")
Using GitHub PAT from the git credential store.
Downloading GitHub repo tdhock/2026-01-aa-grande-echelle@réf-issue
Error: Failed to install 'Rcpp.add' from GitHub:
  input string 61 is invalid
In addition: Warning message:
In gsub("[^/]", "", file_list) :
  unable to translate 'tdhock-2026-01-aa-grande-echelle-561a217/r+<ac>f+<ac>rences.org' to a wide string
> traceback()
7: stop(remote_install_error(remotes[[i]], e))
6: value[[3L]](cond)
5: tryCatchOne(expr, names, parentenv, handlers[[1L]])
4: tryCatchList(expr, classes, parentenv, handlers)
3: tryCatch(res[[i]] <- install_remote(remotes[[i]], ...), error = function(e) {
       stop(remote_install_error(remotes[[i]], e))
   })
2: install_remotes(remotes, auth_token = auth_token, host = host, 
       dependencies = dependencies, upgrade = upgrade, force = force, 
       quiet = quiet, build = build, build_opts = build_opts, build_manual = build_manual, 
       build_vignettes = build_vignettes, repos = repos, type = type, 
       ...)
1: remotes::install_github("tdhock/2026-01-aa-grande-echelle/demos/Rcpp-add-pkg@réf-issue")
> sessionInfo()
R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 26100)

Matrix products: default
  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

time zone: America/Toronto
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  utils     datasets  grDevices methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.5.2 tools_4.5.2    curl_7.0.0     remotes_2.5.0 
> Encoding("ê")
[1] "UTF-8"
> Encoding(" ")
[1] "unknown"