displaying Japanese characters retrieved from MySQL in R

Question

I am struggling to display Japanese characters in a dataframe, which have been retrieved from a MySQL database using the RMySQL package. Japanese characters display fine if I paste a string from the database into a variable, which then has the Encoding 'UTF-8'. The Encoding of the dataframe column is 'unknown' and I haven't managed to change it using iconv.

A line of the database is:

1.00    20120801    4520000000000.00    1.00    379.00  142.00  北日本フード　スーパー極上キムチ　３３０ｇ

Retrieved using:

rs <- dbSendQuery(con, "select * from sales");
data <- fetch(rs, n=-1)

First row of data:

1     1 20120801 4.52e+12        1   379    142 ?????????????????????

Any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The problem seems to be fixed by adding the following line before retrieving that data:

rs <- dbSendQuery(con, 'set character set "utf8"')