I have an .RData file to read on my Linux (UTF-8) machine, but I know the file is in Latin1 because I've created them myself on Windows. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original files or a Windows machine and I need to read those files on my Linux machine.
To read an Rdata file, the normal procedure is to run load("file.Rdata")
. Functions such as read.csv
have an encoding
argument that you can use to solve those kind of issues, but load
has no such thing. If I try load("file.Rdata", encoding = latin1)
, I just get this (expected) error:
Error in load("file.Rdata", encoding = "latin1") : unused argument (encoding = "latin1")
What else can I do? My files are loaded with text variables containing accents that get corrupted when opened in an UTF-8 environment.
Thanks to 42's comment, I've managed to write a function to recode the file:
fix.encoding <- function(df, originalEncoding = "latin1") {
numCols <- ncol(df)
for (col in 1:numCols) Encoding(df[, col]) <- originalEncoding
return(df)
}
The meat here is the command Encoding(df[, col]) <- "latin1"
, which takes column col
of dataframe df
and converts it to latin1 format. Unfortunately, Encoding
only takes column objects as input, so I had to create a function to sweep all columns of a dataframe object and apply the transformation.
Of course, if your problem is in just a couple of columns, you're better off just applying the Encoding
to those columns instead of the whole dataframe (you can modify the function above to take a set of columns as input). Also, if you're facing the inverse problem, i.e. reading an R object created in Linux or Mac OS into Windows, you should use originalEncoding = "UTF-8"
.