title: Read a shapefile with character encoding
body: <p>Is there a way to read a shape file with a specific character encoding? I'm trying to read in a Canadian shapefile that has special (French) characters in some of the names. I can convert them manually, but I'd prefer not to do this if there's a setting somewhere that I'm so far blind to. </p>
  
  <pre><code># manual conversion works
  library(maptools)
  shp &lt;- file.path("path/to/file.shp")
  map &lt;- readShapePoly(shp, proj4string = CRS("+init=epsg:25832"))
  map$ERNAME &lt;- iconv(map$ERNAME, "Windows-1252", "UTF-8") 
  </code></pre>