title: R: can't read unicode text files even when specifying the encoding
body: <p>I'm using R 3.1.1 on Windows 7 32bits. I'm having a lot of problems reading some text files on which I want to perform textual analysis. According to Notepad++, the files are encoded with <strong>"UCS-2 Little Endian"</strong>. (grepWin, a tool whose name says it all, says the file is "Unicode".)</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that I can't seem to read the file even specifying that encoding. (The characters are of the standard spanish Latin set -ñáó- and should be handled easily with CP1252 or anything like that.)</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; Sys.getlocale()
  [1] "LC_COLLATE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_CTYPE=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_MONETARY=Spanish_Spain.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Spanish_Spain.1252"
  &gt; readLines("filename.txt")
   [1] "ÿþE" ""    ""    ""    ""   ...
  &gt; readLines("filename.txt",encoding="UTF-8")
   [1] "\xff\xfeE" ""          ""          ""          ""    ...
  &gt; readLines("filename.txt",encoding="UCS2LE")
   [1] "ÿþE" ""    ""    ""    ""    ""    ""     ...
  &gt; readLines("filename.txt",encoding="UCS2")
   [1] "ÿþE" ""    ""    ""    ""    ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!!</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>edit: the "UTF-16", "UTF-16LE" and "UTF-16BE" encondings fails similarly</p>