[R] Reading a txt file from internet

[Enrico Schumann]

On Sun, 08 Sep 2024, Christofer Bogaso writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am trying to the data from
> https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files/ch15/employee.txt
> without any success. Below is the error I am getting:
>
>> read.delim('https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files/ch15/employee.txt')
>
> Error in make.names(col.names, unique = TRUE) :
>
>   invalid multibyte string at '<ff><fe>t'
>
> In addition: Warning messages:
>
> 1: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
>
>   line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls
>
> 2: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
>
>   line 2 appears to contain embedded nulls
>
> 3: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
>
>   line 3 appears to contain embedded nulls
>
> 4: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
>
>   line 4 appears to contain embedded nulls
>
> 5: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
>
>   line 5 appears to contain embedded nulls
>
> Is there any way to read this data directly onto R?
>
> Thanks for your time
>

The <ff><fe> looks like a byte-order mark
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark).
Try this:

    fn <- file('https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files/ch15/employee.txt',
               encoding = "UTF-16LE")
    read.delim(fn)

-- 
Enrico Schumann
Lucerne, Switzerland
https://enricoschumann.net