On Dec 31, 2011, at 16:05 , Dennis Fisher wrote:
> R version: 2.13.1
> OS X
>
> Colleagues,
>
> I am working with a CSV file; for testing purposes, I created an XLS version
> of the file.
> When I read these files using read.xls (gdata) or read.csv, I encounter an
> error:
> Error in type.convert(data[[i]], as.is = as.is[i], dec = dec,
> na.strings = character(0L)) :
> invalid multibyte string at '<b0>C'
> The error occurs whether or not I invoke the "as.is" option of read.csv.
>
> The trigger for this error is a "degree C" string (\xb0). The offending line
> is:
> [1]
> "\"DD4A14\",\"VITALS\",\"SITE038\",\"038-501\",\"SCREENING\",\"\",\"Temperature\",\"37.8\",\"\xb0C\",\"1005_TS\",\"e2\",\"1005/cla\",\"\",5/25/2011,-1,2,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,7/20/2011
> 16:48:25,240,1"
I think this means that you are working in UTF-8, trying to read something that
is encoded in Latin-1. Try playing with the fileEncoding or encoding arguments;
my first try would be fileEncoding="latin1".
-pd
>
> I can get around the error by reading the file with readLines, then editing
> out that character:
> PATH <- textConnection(sub("\xb0", "degrees", readLines(PATH)))
> read.csv(PATH, header=T, as.is=T)
> This alternate approach is successful. This leads to two questions:
>
> 1. Why can readLines handle that character string whereas read.csv cannot?
>
> 2. Reading the text connection is slow - it takes ~ 11 seconds to read a
> file with 11K rows. I edited the file to replace to offending character with
> "degree". read.csv reads the 11K rows of the new file in a fraction of a
> second. Can someone explain why reading the text connection is so much slower
> than reading a file?
>
> Dennis
>
> Dennis Fisher MD
> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
> Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
> Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
> www.PLessThan.com
>
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--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com
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