title: Reading a CSV with observations containing a "–" sign
body: <p>I have an excel file with the first column looking like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Age
  17–20
  17–20
  17–20
  17–20
  21–24
  21–24
  21–24
  21–24
  25–29
  25–29
  25–29
  25–29
  30–34
  30–34
  30–34
  30–34
  35–39
  35–39
  35–39
  35–39
  40–49
  40–49
  40–49
  40–49
  50–59
  50–59
  50–59
  50–59
  60+
  60+
  60+
  60+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I would like to read this into R without changing each individual observation in excel. I used the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>df39 &lt;- read.csv("AutoCollision.csv",header=TRUE,sep=",",
                   colClasses=c("character","character","numeric","numeric"))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, this makes the data set look like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>            Age Vehicle_Use Severity Claim_Count
  1  17\xd020    Pleasure   250.48          21
  2  17\xd020  DriveShort   274.78          40
  3  17\xd020   DriveLong   244.52          23
  4  17\xd020    Business   797.80           5
  5  21\xd024    Pleasure   213.71          63
  6  21\xd024  DriveShort   298.60         171
  7  21\xd024   DriveLong   298.13          92
  8  21\xd024    Business   362.23          44
  9  25\xd029    Pleasure   250.57         140
  10 25\xd029  DriveShort   248.56         343
  11 25\xd029   DriveLong   297.90         318
  12 25\xd029    Business   342.31         129
  13 30\xd034    Pleasure   229.09         123
  14 30\xd034  DriveShort   228.48         448
  15 30\xd034   DriveLong   293.87         361
  16 30\xd034    Business   367.46         169
  17 35\xd039    Pleasure   153.62         151
  18 35\xd039  DriveShort   201.67         479
  19 35\xd039   DriveLong   238.21         381
  20 35\xd039    Business   256.21         166
  21 40\xd049    Pleasure   208.59         245
  22 40\xd049  DriveShort   202.80         970
  23 40\xd049   DriveLong   236.06         719
  24 40\xd049    Business   352.49         304
  25 50\xd059    Pleasure   207.57         266
  26 50\xd059  DriveShort   202.67         859
  27 50\xd059   DriveLong   253.63         504
  28 50\xd059    Business   340.56         162
  29      60+    Pleasure   192.00         260
  30      60+  DriveShort   196.33         578
  31      60+   DriveLong   259.79         312
  32      60+    Business   342.58          96
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why did it change the minus signs to "\xd0" and how could I go about fixing this? Thanks in advance!</p>