Question

I use read.delim(filename) without any parameters to read a tab delimited text file in R.

df = read.delim(file)

This worked as intended. Now I have a weird error message and I can’t make any sense of it:

Error in type.convert(data[[i]], as.is = as.is[i], dec = dec, na.strings = character(0L)) : 
invalid multibyte string at '<fd>'
Calls: read.delim -> read.table -> type.convert
Execution halted

Can anybody explain what a multibyte string is? What does fd mean? Are there other ways to read a tab file in R? I have column headers and lines which do not have data for all columns.

Answer 1

I realize this is pretty late, but I had a similar problem and I figured I’d post what worked for me. I used the iconv utility (e.g., "iconv file.pcl -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 -c"). The “-c” option skips characters that can’t be translated.