Developing Package R Using UTF-8 on Windows

Question

I am not in an English-speaking country. We need to be able to develop our local language in our code.

I am trying to develop a package, but the encoding problem. A package is just a way to organize my code. This means that it contains magic strings for column names and data values, for example:

data %>% select("Åsen", Region) %>% filter(Region == "Åholt") 

This code wrapped in the function defined in my package will fail if Å is converted to some strange characters when I try to run it, as a result of which it will fail because there is no column or data containing the specified strange characters.

All my source code files use UTF-8 encoding.

Development in English is not an option.

I have the following set in my DESCRIPTION file:

 Depends: R (>= 3.30) Encoding: UTF-8 

Edit:

Using options(encoding = "UTF-8") at the top of my main script from which I am invoking my package seems to fix the problem of having non-ascii characters in my package code.

Can anyone who knows about this shed light on this?