How to convert special symbols in web scraping with R?

Question

I am learning how to scrape the web with the XML and the RCurl packages. All goes well except for one thing. Special characters like ö or č they are read in differently into R. For instance the í is read in as ÃÂ. I assume the latter is some sort of HTML coding for the first.

I have been looking for a way to convert these characters but I have not found it. I am sure other people have stumbled upon this problem as well, and I suspect there must be some sort of function to convert these characters. Does anyone know the solution? Thanks in advance.

Here is an example of the code, sorry I did not provide it earlier.

library(XML)
url <-   'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Wimbledon_Championships_%E2%80%93_Men%27s_Singles'
tables <- readHTMLTable(url)
Sec <- tables[[6]]
pl1R1 <- unlist(strsplit(as.character(Sec[,2]), ' '))[seq(2,32, 4)]
enc2utf8(pl1R1) # does not seem to work

Answer 1

Try parsing it first while specifying the encoding, then reading the table, as here: readHTMLTable and UTF-8 encoding .

An example might be:

library(XML)
url <- "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Wimbledon_Championships_%E2%80%93_Men%27s_Singles"
doc <- htmlParse(url, encoding = "UTF-8") #this will preserve characters
tables <- as.data.frame(readHTMLTable(doc, stringsAsFactors = FALSE))
Sec <- tables[[6]]
#not sure what you're trying to do here though
pl1R1 <- unlist(strsplit(as.character(Sec[,2]), ' '))[seq(2,32, 4)]