Invalid multibyte string in read.csv

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?

Solution 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=""))))

Solution 2:

You may have encountered this issue because of the incompatibility of system locale try setting the system locale with this code Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "C")

Solution 3:

The readr package from the tidyverse universe might help.

You can set the encoding via the local argument of the read_csv() function by using the local() function and its encoding argument:

read_csv(file = "http://www.mof.go.jp/international_policy/reference/itn_transactions_in_securities/week.csv",
         skip = 14,
         local = locale(encoding = "latin1"))

Solution 4:

I had the same error and tried all the above to no avail. The issue vanished when I upgraded from R 3.4.0 to 3.4.3, so if your R version is not up to date, update it!

Solution 5:

The simplest solution I found for this issue without losing any data/special character (for example when using fileEncoding="latin1" characters like the Euro sign € will be lost) is to open the file first in a text editor like Sublime Text, and to "Save with encoding - UTF-8".

Then R can import the file with no issue and no character loss.