title: How to open dbf file in UTF-8
body: <p>I have a dbf file in UTF-8 encoding. When I open it in R, with <code>read.dbf()</code> (package <code>foreign</code>) on Windows with CP1250 charset, characters are damaged:</p>
  <pre><code>require(foreign)
  x &lt;- read.dbf('file.dbf')
  Sys.setlocale()
  # &quot;LC_COLLATE=Czech_Czech Republic.1250;LC_CTYPE=Czech_Czech Republic.1250;LC_MONETARY=Czech_Czech Republic.1250;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Czech_Czech Republic.1250&quot;
  </code></pre>
  <p>I was wondering whether I should set different locale, as advised on some answers here, but it doesn't work on Win XP - when I try to set the locale to UTF-8, it says &quot;OS reports request to set locale to &quot;Czech_Czech Rebublic.UTF8&quot; cannot be honored&quot;.</p>
  <p>I don't think that setting a new locale should be necessary by design (also <a href="http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Please-guide-UTF-8-locale-setting-fails-on-Windows-on-writing-td4719064.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">see here</a>) - <strong>it should be the function <code>read.dbf()</code> probably, or maybe some postprocessing, to handle the charset without having to switch the locale of the whole R system</strong>.</p>
  <h3>Do you know how to do that?</h3>