How to Solve UTF-8 Character Encoding Issues When Fetching Text from MySQL in R?

Resolving UTF-8 Character Encoding Issue When Fetching Text from MySQL in R

Retrieving UTF-8 encoded text from a MySQL database into R can present challenges, resultin in corrupted characters displayed as "?" symbols. Several attempts to resolve this issue using R and different packages have proven unsuccessful.

The root cause of this problem lies in the default character set used by the connections established with the database from R. By default, R's locale is set to en_US.UTF-8, but the database itself may be configured to use a different character set, such as latin1, which does not support UTF-8 encoding.

To solve this issue, it is necessary to ensure that the connection session is explicitly set to use UTF-8 encoding. There are two approaches to achieve this:

Using RMySQL:

After establishing a connection to the MySQL database using dbConnect(MySQL()), execute the following query:

SET NAMES utf8

This query changes the character set for the current session to UTF-8, ensuring that any subsequent queries will retrieve data correctly encoded in UTF-8.

Using RODBC:

When connecting to the database using odbcDriverConnect(), specify the CharSet=utf8 parameter within the DSN string:

con <- odbcDriverConnect('DRIVER=mysql;user=root;CharSet=utf8')

By explicitly setting the character set to UTF-8, the connection established through RODBC will retrieve data using the correct encoding, resolving the issue with corrupted characters.

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