fread (data.table in R) with specification of encoding
As of August 25th the case linked by David Arenburg is closed, and the functionality is included in the currently available version of data.table. The encoding parameter can now be used when calling fread:
text <- fread(file, encoding = 'UTF-8')ASCII is not an explicit encoding option, but ASCII is valid UTF-8, so you can specify UTF-8 when you want to read your Hebrew text.