[R] Reading a txt file from internet

[Jeff Newmiller]

I tried it on R 4.4.1 on Linux Mint 21.3 just before I posted it, and I just tried it on R 3.4.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 and R 4.3.2 on Windows 11 just now and it works on all of them.

I don't have a big-endian machine to test on, but the Unicode spec says to honor the BOM and if there isn't one to assume that it is big-endian data. But in this case there is a BOM so your machine has a buggy decoder?

On September 7, 2024 2:43:24 PM PDT, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
>On 2024-09-07 4:52 p.m., Jeff Newmiller via R-help wrote:
>> 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.
>
>That sounds like good advice, but it doesn't work:
>
> > read.delim(
> +     'https://online.stat.psu.edu/onlinecourses/sites/stat501/files /ch15/employee.txt',
> +     fileEncoding = "UTF-16"
> + )
> [1] time 
>
>
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> [2] vendor.洀攀琀愀氀........㐀㐀........㜀.㐀㐀........㤀.㐀㐀.㐀..㐀.....㐀..㐀..㔀...㜀.㐀..㠀..㘀...㠀.㐀㐀....㜀...㔀.㐀㐀.
>
>and so on.
>> 
>> 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.