R: How do I get rid of a question mark block in a character string?

Question

I have a vector with a bunch of Company Name observations that came from a separate data frame. I was using the vector as a way to look at a list of all of the unique company names in the data frame, then cleaning it (correcting misspellings, changing/removing names from mergers, etc.). The renaming is done line by line (i.e. hard-coded) due to the nature of the data not allowing for a silky-smooth cleaning process. I have run into a strange problem I'm not sure how to fix.

There were a few companies whose names involved certain special characters, like 'ñ', 'ü', 'é', etc. Looking at this vector from the View window, those observations also had an identical entry next to them, except with a strange question mark block in place of those letters. For example:

Company_Name

SES (Société Européenne des Satellites (SES))
SES (Soci�t� Europ�enne des Satellites (SES))

Initially, I fixed misspellings with a line of code like this:

dataframe$Company_Name[which(dataframe$Company_Name == "SES (Société Européenne des Satellites (SES))" | dataframe$Company_Name == "SES (Soci\xe9t\xe9 Europ\xe9enne des Satellites (SES))"] <- "SES S.A."

The alternative name you see after the name with the accented 'e's is the name with the question mark blocks. I got that alternative name by calling the specific line of the vector that the question-blocked name came up on (i.e. vector[32] ), and physically copying and pasting the output into the code.

Ideally, the vector would end up looking like this once the clean had finished:

Company_Name

SES S.A.

However, instead of removing the question mark blocks, it keeps them:

Company_Name

SES S.A.
SES (Soci�t� Europ�enne des Satellites (SES))

Has anyone else ran into a similar problem? I've checked if the problem was in the spelling, but that doesn't seem to be the issue. Any help is greatly appreciated.

(Note: I have no preferences for specific packages - all options are on the table!)

Answer 1

This is probably an Encoding problem.

Look at the Encoding of the rows with question mark :

Encoding(Company_Name)

For french sentences, you should set the encoding as follows :

Encoding(Company_Name)<-'latin1'