Fast method to read csv with UTF-16LE encoding

Question

I'm dealing with .csv files with UTF-16LE encoding, this method works to read the files, but read.csv is very slow compared to read_csv.

  read.csv2(path,dec=",",skip=1,header=T,fileEncoding="UTF-16LE",sep="/t")

Unfortunately I can't make read_csv work, I only get empty rows and I don't find a way to even specify encoding in the function.

I can't share my data, but if anyone dealt with this encoding any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can specify file encodings with readr functions like read_csv with the locale option: locale=locale(encoding="UTF-16LE"). However, I haven't successfully read in a utf-16le file with read_csv. I get an "Incomplete multibyte sequence" error. There's a related issue filed, but I still have issues with my file -- hopefully others will have more success.