R version: 2.13.1 OS X Colleagues,
I am working with a CSV file; for testing purposes, I created an XLS version of the file. When I read these files using read.xls (gdata) or read.csv, I encounter an error: Error in type.convert(data[[i]], as.is = as.is[i], dec = dec, na.strings = character(0L)) : invalid multibyte string at '<b0>C' The error occurs whether or not I invoke the "as.is" option of read.csv. The trigger for this error is a "degree C" string (\xb0). The offending line is: [1] "\"DD4A14\",\"VITALS\",\"SITE038\",\"038-501\",\"SCREENING\",\"\",\"Temperature\",\"37.8\",\"\xb0C\",\"1005_TS\",\"e2\",\"1005/cla\",\"\",5/25/2011,-1,2,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,7/20/2011 16:48:25,240,1" I can get around the error by reading the file with readLines, then editing out that character: PATH <- textConnection(sub("\xb0", "degrees", readLines(PATH))) read.csv(PATH, header=T, as.is=T) This alternate approach is successful. This leads to two questions: 1. Why can readLines handle that character string whereas read.csv cannot? 2. Reading the text connection is slow - it takes ~ 11 seconds to read a file with 11K rows. I edited the file to replace to offending character with "degree". read.csv reads the 11K rows of the new file in a fraction of a second. Can someone explain why reading the text connection is so much slower than reading a file? Dennis Dennis Fisher MD P < (The "P Less Than" Company) Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784) Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784) www.PLessThan.com ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.