R special characters from html tables

Question

I'm working on a simple script to scrape data from HTML tables. Problem is that table contains special characters, even if it says it's downloaded as utf-8.

 library(XML)
 webpage.Name <- "http://www.registeruz.sk/cruz-public/domain/financialreport/show/4817607"
 webpage.Name.table <- readHTMLTable(webpage.Name, header=T, which=1,stringsAsFactors=F)

Example of data scraped:

     V1                                             V2
1  Mimoriadna                                      <NA>
2                                                  <NA>
3  Ă<U+009A>ÄŤtovná jednotka:                     malá
4  DaĹ<U+0088>ovĂ© identifikaÄŤnĂ© ÄŤĂ­slo:      2023790373

I tried using gsub and changing certain paterns but it doesn't seem to work. Same with iconv from utf-8 to latin1. It doesn't matter if the data after the scraping contains special characters or not.

Answer 1

Use encoding = "UTF-8" in readHTMLTable()

df <- readHTMLTable(webpage.Name, 
    header = TRUE, which = 1, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, encoding = "UTF-8")
head(df, 4)
#                            V1                          V2
# 1                  Mimoriadna                        <NA>
# 2                                                    <NA>
# 3           Účtovná jednotka:                        malá
# 4 Daňové identifikačné číslo:                  2023790373