[R] Reading a txt file from internet

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 2024-09-07 7:37 p.m., Jeff Newmiller wrote:
> 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?

Sounds like it!  I did it on a Mac running R 4.4.1.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> [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)
>>>>
>>>
>>
>