My installation is R version 2.4.0 on Mac OS X version 10.4.8 (the latest release in both cases). I've recently had to restore my hard drive after a crash, and fear that this may have screwed up my Perl installation slightly. Whenever I run the read.xls function from library(gtools) I get the following errors: ###################### > file = "~/Desktop/my_excel_file.xls" > read.xls(file) Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection In addition: Warning message: cannot open file '/tmp/Rtmp6QRggx/file10d63af1.csv', reason 'No such file or directory' perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_US_POSIX.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). Unable to open file '~/Desktop/2006_ICN_subjects.xls'. ###################### On the other hand, if I use the example in the help file... ###################### > xlsfile <- file.path(.path.package('gdata'),'xls','iris.xls') > read.xls(xlsfile) perl: warning: Setting locale failed. Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species X 1 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa 2 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa ... 61 62 5.9 3.0 4.2 1.5 versicolor 62 63 6.0 2.2 4.0 1.0 versicolor perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_US_POSIX.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). ###################### To summarize, I can retrieve data from the example file, but I get the Perl warning. I can't retrieve data from any of my own Excel files. I've tried a number of locale solutions (locale -a doesn't list en_US_POSIX.UTF-8, but Sys.setlocale(LC_ALL = "C") doesn't help). Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, -Ashish Ranpura. ----- Ashish Ranpura Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience University College London 17 Queen Square London WC1N 3AR tel: +44 (20) 7679 1126 web: http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk