title: Encoding of Umlauts while importing into R tables
body: <p>I need to join two tables on the colum <code>name</code>. They come from different excel spreadsheets which I didn't create. I imported both sheets into <code>R</code> tables using the function <code>read.xls</code> from the <code>gdata</code> package.</p>
  
  <p>Sometimes the names contains umlauts and other accents. They appear identical within the excel sheets but when I import them into R they are not the same. Hence my join doesn't join. I join using the <code>sqldf</code> function.</p>
  
  <p>As an example : I see <code>Lück</code> in the two spreadsheets. In table1 of R this appears as <code>L\374ck</code> whereas in table2 it appears as <code>L\303\274ck</code>.</p>
  
  <p>How can I best solve this problem? Is there a way to force an encoding when data is imported? Or should one try to force the comparison of strings in a different way?</p>