If I recall correctly, Excel's 'Unicode' used to mean "UTF-16", which R's scan() did not recognize without a hint. The relevant argument is fileEncoding, not encoding. UTF-16 files generally have lots of null bytes and UTF-8 files have no null bytes and if you try to read UTF-16 as UTF-8 you get the embedded-null warning.
I don't have Excel installed, but the following example is from R-3.5.2 on a Linux box. > f8 <- file(tf8 <- tempfile(), open="w", encoding="UTF-8") > cat("\u0416;zh\n", file=f8); close(f8) > readBin(tf8, what="raw", n=file.size(tf8)) [1] d0 96 3b 7a 68 0a > > f16 <- file(tf16 <- tempfile(), open="w", encoding="UTF-16") > cat("\u0416;zh\n", file=f16); close(f16) > readBin(tf16, what="raw", n=file.size(tf16)) [1] ff fe 16 04 3b 00 7a 00 68 00 0a 00 > > read.csv(tf8, sep=";", header=FALSE) V1 V2 1 Ж zh > read.csv(tf16, sep=";", header=FALSE) Error in type.convert.default(data[[i]], as.is = as.is[i], dec = dec, : invalid multibyte string at '<ff><fe>' In addition: Warning messages: 1: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote, : line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls 2: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote, : line 2 appears to contain embedded nulls 3: In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote, : incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on '/tmp/RtmpzfG6eG/file40e53389f40e' > read.csv(tf16, sep=";", header=FALSE, fileEncoding="UTF-16") V1 V2 1 Ж zh . Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 8:12 PM Abby Spurdle <spurdl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Don't be so US-centric, Abby... how do you know that javad's version of > Excel doesn't default to using semicolons? > > I don't. > > However, Comma-Separated Values (CSV) are, comma separated, by definition. > So, if the files use semicolons, then... > > Also, the use of the wrong sep="my.delim" argument is the most likely cause > of single column output. > > However, you're right, I don't really know, I'm just guessing... > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.