How to solve error **Error in nchar(rownames(m)) : invalid multibyte string, element 1**?

Question

Create document-term matrix

dtm <- DocumentTermMatrix(docs, control = params)

Error in nchar(rownames(m)) : invalid multibyte string, element 1

Anyone who knows how to tackle this error? Working in Rstudio

Answer 1

Sys.setlocale( 'LC_ALL','C' ) 

In R studio apply this code .. It will refresh the locale .. worked for me many times.

Answer 2

This happens when your input text isn't UTF-8 encoded. You can read about character encoding here.

Another good reference is this

I've found that the best way to handle these issues is to use stringr::str_conv.

mydocs <- c("doc1", "doc2", "doc3")

stringr::str_conv(mydocs, "UTF-8")

Where you have non-UTF-8 characters, you'll get a warning, but the character vector that comes out the other side will be usable.

Do that to your docs vector before calling `DocumentTermMatrix.