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 [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.