r - Weird characters added to first column name after reading a toad-exported csv file

Question

Whenever I read a csv file in R (read.csv("file_name.csv")) that was exported using toad, the first column name is preceded by the following characters "?..". Also, opening the csv file in excel or notepad++ shows up correctly (without the preceding characters). This is a hassle as my workaround has been to rename the column after each read. Thanks for any fix to this issue!

Edit:
The export was created in Toad by right-clicking on the result set of a query and selecting
'Quick Export -> File -> CSV File'

More details per comment:

head(readLines('test_file.csv'),n=3)`<br>
[1] "???ID,LOCATION" "12021,1204" "12281,1204"

Answer 1

Try this:

d <- read.csv("test_file.csv", fileEncoding="UTF-8-BOM")

This works in R 3.0.0+ and removes the BOM if present in the file (common for files generated from Microsoft applications: Excel, SQL server)