read.csv() with UTF-8 encoding

Question

I am trying to read in data from a csv file and specify the encoding of the characters to be UTF-8. From reading through the ?read.csv() instructions, it seems that fileEncoding set equal to UTF-8 should accomplish this, however, I am not seeing that when checking. Is there a better way to specify the encoding of character strings to be UTF-8 when importing the data?

Sample Data:

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fruit<- read.csv("fruit.csv", header = TRUE, fileEncoding = "UTF-8")
fruit[] <- lapply(fruit, as.character)
Encoding(fruit$Fruit)

The output is "uknown" but I would expect this to be "UTF-8". What is the best way to ensure all imported characters are UTF-8? Thank you.

Answer 1

fruit       <- read.csv("fruit.csv", header = TRUE)
fruit[]     <- lapply(fruit, as.character)
fruit$Fruit <- paste0(fruit$Fruit, "\xfcmlaut") # Get non-ASCII char and jam it in!
Encoding(fruit$Fruit)

[1] "latin1" "latin1" "latin1"

fruit$Fruit <- enc2utf8(fruit$Fruit)
Encoding(fruit$Fruit)

[1] "UTF-8" "UTF-8" "UTF-8"