R help - Nov 2019 - Problem related to multibyte string in CSV file

R 3.6.1
OS X

Colleagues, 

I read the first line of a CSV file using the readLines command; the only option
was n=1 (I am interested in only the first line of the file)
	STRING	<- readLines(FILE, n=1)
to which R responded:
	Warning message: 
	In readLines(FILE, n = 1) : line 1 appears to contain an embedded nul 

I then attempted to determine the number of characters in that string:
	nchar(STRING) 
to which R responded:
	Error in nchar(STRING) : invalid multibyte string, element 1 
	
I then went to examine the string:
	print(STRING) 
	[1] "\xff\xfet?
and:
	cat(STRING, "\n?)
	??t

I was surprised to see the difference in the output of cat vs. string (see
above).  But I assume this results from the multibyte characters.

Now to my question:  I am trying to automate this process and I would like to
see the output from the print command but without the [1] that precedes the
string.
If I am working at the command line, RGUI, or RStudio, I can type
	STRING<CR>
However, in a script, I need to preface STRING with either ?print? or ?cat? (or
something else).
Short of writing my own print method, is there any simple way to accomplish
this?

Dennis

Dennis Fisher MD
P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
Phone / Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
www.PLessThan.com

On Thu, 14 Nov 2019 09:34:30 -0800
Dennis Fisher <fisher at plessthan.com> wrote:
> 	Warning message: 
> 	In readLines(FILE, n = 1) : line 1 appears to contain an
> embedded nul 
<...>
> 	print(STRING) 
> 	[1] "\xff\xfet?
Most probably, this means that the FILE is UCS-2LE-encoded (or maybe
UTF-16). Unlike UTF-8, text encoded using UCS-2LE may contain NUL bytes
if the code points in question are U+00FF and below. You should decode
it before processing it in R; one of the examples in ?readLines shows
how to do it:

# read a 'Windows Unicode' file
A <- readLines(con <- file("Unicode.txt", encoding =
"UCS-2LE"))
close(con)
 
> Now to my question:  I am trying to automate this process and I would
> like to see the output from the print command but without the [1]
> that precedes the string.
Try encodeString combined with cat or message.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan