title: Reading Rdata file with different encoding
body: <p>I have an .RData file to read on my Linux (UTF-8) machine, but I know the file is in Latin1 because I've created them myself on Windows. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original files or a Windows machine and I need to read those files on my Linux machine.</p>
  
  <p>To read an Rdata file, the normal procedure is to run <code>load("file.Rdata")</code>. Functions such as <code>read.csv</code> have an <code>encoding</code> argument that you can use to solve those kind of issues, but <code>load</code> has no such thing. If I try <code>load("file.Rdata", encoding = latin1)</code>, I just get this (expected) error:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Error in load("file.Rdata", encoding = "latin1") : 
      unused argument (encoding = "latin1")</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>What else can I do? My files are loaded with text variables containing accents that get corrupted when opened in an UTF-8 environment.</p>