[R] Reading a txt file from internet

[Jeff Newmiller]

When you specify LE in the encoding type, you are logically telling the decoder that you know the two-byte pairs are in little-endian order... which could override whatever the byte-order-mark was indicating. If the BOM indicated big-endian then the file decoding would break. If there is a BOM, don't override it unless you have to (e.g. for a wrong BOM)... leave off the LE unless you really need it.

On September 7, 2024 1:22:23 PM PDT, Enrico Schumann <es using enricoschumann.net> wrote:
>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)
>

-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.