Remove special characters from a character vector or a GADSdat object.
Also suitable to fix encoding problems of a character vector or a GADSdat object. See details for available options.
The option "other" replaces correctly encoded special signs.
The option "ASCII" works for strings which were encoded presumably using UTF-8 and imported using ASCII encoding.
The option "windows1250" works for strings which were encoded presumably using UTF-8
and imported using windows-1250 encoding.
The option "BRISE" covers a unique case used at the FDZ at IQB.
If entries are all upper case, special characters are also transformed to all upper case (e.g., "AE" instead
of "Ae").