readHTMLTable and UTF-8 encoding

Question

I have encoding problem with readHTMLTable and XML package generally. I would like to download some tables from polish site allegro.pl (auction site similar to ebay), but after so, there is a encoding problem with polish fonts, even if I used encoding="UTF-8" or stringsAsFactors=F in readHTMLTable.

Code:

library(XML)
url<-paste("http://allegro.pl/listing.php/search?category=15821&sg=0&p=",1:5,"&string=facebook",sep="")

alldata<-NULL

for (i in 1:5){
dane<-as.data.frame(readHTMLTable(url[i],1,stringsAsFactors = TRUE, encoding="UTF-8")$lista)
alldata<-rbind(alldata,dane)
}

Result:

> head(alldata[,c(2,3)])
                                                        V2                      V3
1     Facebook Fan Page z ANIMACJĄ indywidualny projekt Kup Teraz! 150,00 zł
2 Lubię to! Facebook! OKAZJA!!! 160 FANĂ“W!!! ZOBACZ!  Kup Teraz! 10,99 zł
3    125 fanĂÂłw fani like fanpage FACEBOOK polskie konta  Kup Teraz! 10,00 zł
4    Reklama Fanpage 43500+ fanĂÂłw, fani, facebook Efekt  Kup Teraz! 17,99 zł
5       Facebook Fanpage -Stworzenie Profesjonalnego Konta  Kup Teraz! 77,90 zł
6       Facebook Fanpage -Skuteczna Obsługa/Reklama /FV Kup Teraz! 100,00 zł

If I use getURL or readLines there is no problem but I want to use XML package, beacuse it's great thing :)

There's always this problem when I use XML package functions such as htmlParse, xpathApply or mentioned readHTMLTable.

I am working on Rstudio 0.94.110 @ Windows7. SessionInfo below.

R version 2.14.0 (2011-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Polish_Poland.1250  LC_CTYPE=Polish_Poland.1250    LC_MONETARY=Polish_Poland.1250 LC_NUMERIC=C                   LC_TIME=Polish_Poland.1250    

attached base packages:
[1] splines   stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] spdep_0.5-41     coda_0.14-6      deldir_0.0-16    maptools_0.8-10  foreign_0.8-46   nlme_3.1-102     Matrix_1.0-1     lattice_0.20-0   boot_1.3-3      
[10] sp_0.9-91        maps_2.2-2       RCurl_1.7-0.1    bitops_1.0-4.1   XML_3.4-2.2      Cairo_1.5-1      car_2.0-11       survival_2.36-10 nnet_7.3-1      
[19] MASS_7.3-16     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] grid_2.14.0  tools_2.14.0

Answer 1

for some time I was mailing with Duncan Temple Lang, the creator of XML package. Yesterday (30.01.2012) he uploaded new version of XML package on Omegahat website. New version 3.9-4 for 31bit version of R remove this encoding problem! :)

download package form link below: http://www.omegahat.org/R/bin/windows/contrib/2.14/

library(XML)
url<-paste("http://allegro.pl/listing.php/search?category=15821&sg=0&p=",1:5,"&string=facebook",sep="")
doc = htmlParse(url[1], encoding = "UTF-8")
z = as.data.frame(readHTMLTable(doc, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)$lista)

It works, so we can close this topic. :)