title: How can I change the encoding of a text file that is delimited by pipe and quotes so I can read it into R?
body: <p>I want to read data from a text file into an R dataframe.  The data is delimited by pipes <code>|</code> and also has quotes around the values.  I've tried some combinations of <code>read.table</code> but it's importing everything into a single field as opposed to splitting it.  The data looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"CompetitorDataID"|"CompetitorID"|"ItemID"|"UserID"|"CountryID"|"SegmentID"|"TaskID"|"Price"|"Comment"|"CreateDate"|"GeneralCustomer"|"TenderResult"
  "29"|"5"|"187630"|"1375"|"5"|"398"|"4085"|"5.000000"|"test"|"2013-01-1002:58:23.230000000"|"False"|"1"
  "30"|"5"|"1341"|"1294"|"5"|"398"|"4088"|"6.000000"|"test"|"2013-01-1003:15:26.687000000"|"False"|"1"
  "31"|"5"|"1007"|"1375"|"5"|"398"|"4105"|"5.000000"|""|"2013-01-1005:50:51.150000000"|"False"|"1"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Although this code will import when pasted into R it won't work from the original text file. I get the following error message:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Warning messages:
  1: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
    line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls
  2: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
    line 2 appears to contain embedded nulls
  3: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
    line 3 appears to contain embedded nulls
  4: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
    line 4 appears to contain embedded nulls
  5: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
    line 5 appears to contain embedded nulls
  6: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
    line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls
  7: In scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec,  :
    embedded nul(s) found in input
  </code></pre>