Invalid multibyte string in read.csv

Question

I am trying to import a csv that is in Japanese. This code:

url <- 'http://www.mof.go.jp/international_policy/reference/itn_transactions_in_securities/week.csv' x <- read.csv(url, header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) 

returns the following error:

Error in type.convert(data[[i]], as.is = as.is[i], dec = dec, na.strings = character(0L)) :  invalid multibyte string at '<91>ΊO<8b>y<82>ёΓ<e0><8f>،<94><94><84><94><83><8c>_<96>񓙂̏󋵁@(<8f>T<8e><9f><81>E<8e>w<92><e8><95>񍐋@<8a>փx<81>[<83>X<81>j' 

I tried changing the encoding (Encoding(url) <- 'UTF-8' and also to latin1) and tried removing the read.csv parameters, but received the same "invalid multibyte string" message in each case. Is there a different encoding that should be used, or is there some other problem?

Answer 1

Encoding sets the encoding of a character string. It doesn't set the encoding of the file represented by the character string, which is what you want.

This worked for me, after trying "UTF-8":

x <- read.csv(url, header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE, fileEncoding="latin1") 

And you may want to skip the first 16 lines, and read in the headers separately. Either way, there's still quite a bit of cleaning up to do.

x <- read.csv(url, header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE,   fileEncoding="latin1", skip=16) # get started with the clean-up x[,1] <- gsub("\u0081|`", "", x[,1])    # get rid of odd characters x[,-1] <- as.data.frame(lapply(x[,-1],  # convert to numbers   function(d) type.convert(gsub(d, pattern=",", replace=""))))