utf 8 - R's read.csv prepending 1st column name with junk text

Question

(This question already has answers here): question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24568056/rs-read-csv-prepending-1st-column-name-with-junk-text

Answer 1

You've got a Unicode UTF-8 BOM at the start of the file:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

A text editor or web browser interpreting the text as ISO-8859-1 or CP1252 will display the characters ??? for this

R is giving you the ? and then converting the other two into dots as they are non-alphanumeric characters.

Here:

http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Writing-Unicode-Text-into-Text-File-from-R-in-Windows-td4684693.html

Duncan Murdoch suggests:

You can declare a file to be in encoding "UTF-8-BOM" if you want to ignore a BOM on input

So try your read.csv with fileEncoding="UTF-8-BOM" or persuade your SQL wotsit to not output a BOM.

Otherwise you may as well test if the first name starts with ?.. and strip it with substr (as long as you know you'll never have a column that does start like that genuinely...)