I can't read in data to R

Question

I am trying to read in some data that is is a text file that looks like this:

2009-08-09 - 2009-08-15 0   2   0
2009-08-16 - 2009-08-22 0   1   0
2009-08-23          


        

Answer 1

The file you are reading is probably using some encoding other than ASCII. ?read.table shows

 read.table(file, header = FALSE, sep = "", quote = "\"'",
            ... 
            fileEncoding = "", encoding = "unknown")

fileEncoding: character string: if non-empty declares the encoding used
          on a file (not a connection) so the character data can be
          re-encoded.  See 'file'. 

So perhaps try setting the fileEncoding parameter. If you don't know the encoding, perhaps try "utf-8" or "cp-1252". If that does not work, then if you pastebin a snippet of your actual file, we may be able to identify the encoding.