title: Working with Unicode in R
body: <p>I read in text from a MySQL table into and R dataframe. (using RODBC, sqlFetch). Have two questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>How do I figure out if R has read it in as utf-8? It's character
  type but what's the function to show encoding? </li>
  <li>How do I compute the number of characters in an Unicode string in R?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The <code>length</code> function does not work with Unicode and always returns 1 I think.</p>