Read a UTF-8 text file with BOM

Question

I have a text file with Byte order mark (U+FEFF) at the beginning. I am trying to read the file in R. Is it possible to avoid the Byte order mark?

The function

Answer 1

Have you tried read.csv(..., fileEncoding = "UTF-8-BOM")?. ?file says:

As from R 3.0.0 the encoding ‘"UTF-8-BOM"’ is accepted and will remove a Byte Order Mark if present (which it often is for files and webpages generated by Microsoft applications).

Answer 2

This was handled between versions 1.9.6 and 1.9.8 with this commit; update your data.table installation to fix this.

Once done, you can just use fread:

fread("file_name.csv")