A colleague is sending me quite a few files that have been saved with MS 
SQL Server 2005. I am using R 2.15.1 on Windows 7.

I am trying to read in the files using standard techniques. Although the 
file has a csv extension when I go to Excel or WordPad and do SAVE AS I 
see that it is Unicode Text. Notepad indicates that the encoding is 
Unicode. Right now I have to do a few things from within Excel (such as 
Text to Columns) and eventually save as a true csv file before I can 
read it into R and then use it.

Is there an easy way to solve this from within R? I am also open to easy 
SQL Server 2005 solutions.

I tried the following from within R.

testDF = read.table("Info06.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",")

> testDF2 =  iconv(x = testDF, from = "Unicode", to = "")

Error in iconv(x = testDF, from = "Unicode", to = "") :

unsupported conversion from 'Unicode' to '' in codepage 1252

# The next line did not produce an error message

> testDF3 =  iconv(x = testDF, from = "UTF-8" , to = "")

> testDF3[1:6,  1:3]

Error in testDF3[1:6, 1:3] : incorrect number of dimensions

# The next line did not produce an error message

> testDF4 =  iconv(x = testDF, from = "macroman" , to = "")

> testDF4[1:6,  1:3]

Error in testDF4[1:6, 1:3] : incorrect number of dimensions

>  Encoding(testDF3)

[1] "unknown"

>  Encoding(testDF4)

[1] "unknown"

This is the first few lines from WordPad

Date,StockID,Price,MktCap,ADV,SectorID,Days,A1,std1,std2

2006-01-03 
00:00:00.000,@Stock1,2.53,467108197.38,567381.144444444,4,133.14486997089,-0.0162107939626307,0.0346283580367959,0.0126471695454834

2006-01-03 
00:00:00.000,@Stock2,1.3275,829803070.531114,6134778.93292,5,124.632223896458,0.071513138376339,0.0410694546850102,0.0172091268025929


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