R invalid multibyte string

Question

I use read delim filename  without any parameters to read a tab delimited text file in R   df   read delim file    This worked as intended  Now I have a weird error message and I can t make any sense of it   Error in type convert data  i    as is   as is i   dec   dec  na strings   character 0L      invalid multibyte string at   lt fd gt   Calls  read delim - gt  read table - gt  type convert Execution halted   Can anybody explain what a multibyte string is  What does fd mean  Are there other ways to read a tab file in R  I have column headers and lines which do not have data for all columns

User · Answer

I had a similarly strange problem with a file from the program e-prime  edat -  SPSS conversion   but then I discovered that there are many additional encodings you can use  this did the trick for me   tbl  lt - read delim  dir file txt   fileEncoding  UCS-2LE

User · Answer

I realize this is pretty late  but I had a similar problem and I figured I d post what worked for me  I used the iconv utility  e g    iconv file pcl -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 -c    The  -c  option skips characters that can t be translated

User · Answer

This happened to me because I had the  copyright  symbol in one of my strings   Once it was removed  problem solved   A good rule of thumb  make sure that characters not appearing on your keyboard are removed if you are seeing this error

User · Answer

I figured out Leafpad to be an adequate and simple text-editor to view and save convert in certain character sets - at least in the linux-world   I used this to save the Latin-15 to UTF-8 and it worked

User · Answer

If you want an R solution  here s a small convenience function I sometimes use to find where the offending  multiByte  character is lurking  Note that it is the next character to what gets printed  This works because print will work fine  but substr throws an error when multibyte characters are present   find offending character  lt - function x  maxStringLength 256       print x    for  c in 1 maxStringLength       offendingChar  lt - substr x c c       print offendingChar   uncomment if you want the indiv characters printed      the next character is the offending multibyte Character            string vector  lt - c  test    Se x96ora    works fine    lapply string vector  find offending character    I fix that character and run this again  Hope that helps someone who encounters the invalid multibyte string error

[r] R: invalid multibyte string

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