[R] Reading a txt file from internet

[Jeff Newmiller]

Add the

   fileEncoding = "UTF-16"

argument to the read call.

For a human explanation of why this is going on I recommend [1]. For a more R-related take, try [2].

For reference, I downloaded your file and used the "file" command line program typically available on Linux (and possibly MacOSX) which will tell you about what encoding is used in a particular file.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mRxIgu9R70
[2] https://kevinushey.github.io/blog/2018/02/21/string-encoding-and-r/

On September 7, 2024 12:56:36 PM PDT, Christofer Bogaso <bogaso.christofer using gmail.com> wrote:
>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
>
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-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.