Using R, I am trying to scrape a web page save the text, which is in Japanese, to a file. Ultimately this needs to be scaled to tackle hundreds of pages on a daily basis. I already have a workable solution in Perl, but I am trying to migrate the script to R to reduce the cognitive load of switching between multiple languages. So far I am not succeeding. Related questions seem to be this one on saving csv files and this one on writing Hebrew to a HTML file. However, I haven't been successful in cobbling together a solution based on the answers there. The pages are from Yahoo! Japan Finance and my Perl code that looks like this. use strict; use HTML::Tree; use LWP::Simple; #use Encode; use utf8; binmode STDOUT, ":utf8"; my @arr_links = (); $arr_links[1] = "http://stocks.finance.yahoo.co.jp/stocks/detail/?code=7203"; $arr_links[2] = "http://stocks.finance.yahoo.co.jp/stocks/detail/?code=7201"; foreach my $link (@arr_links){ $link =~ s/"//gi; print("$link\n"); my $content = get($link); my $tree = HTML::Tree->new(); $tree->parse($content); my $bar = $tree->as_text; open OUTFILE, ">>:utf8", join("","c:/", substr($link, -4),"_perl.txt") || die; print OUTFILE $bar; } This Perl script produces a CSV file that looks like the screenshot below, with proper kanji and kana that can be mined and manipulated offline: My R code, such as it is, looks like the following. The R script is not an exact duplicate of the Perl solution just given, as it doesn't strip out the HTML and leave the text (this answer suggests an approach using R but it doesn't work for me in this case) and it doesn't have the loop and so on, but the intent is the same. require(RCurl) require(XML) links <- list() links[1] <- "http://stocks.finance.yahoo.co.jp/stocks/detail/?code=7203" links[2] <- "http://stocks.finance.yahoo.co.jp/stocks/detail/?code=7201" txt <- getURL(links, .encoding = "UTF-8") Encoding(txt) <- "bytes" write.table(txt, "c:/geturl_r.txt", quote = FALSE, row.names = FALSE, sep = "\t", fileEncoding = "UTF-8") This R script generates the output shown in the screenshot below. Basically rubbish. I assume that there is some combination of HTML, text and file encoding that will allow me to generate in R a similar result to that of the Perl solution but I cannot find it. The header of the HTML page I'm trying to scrape says the chartset is utf-8 and I have set the encoding in the getURL call and in the write.table function to utf-8, but this alone isn't enough. The question How can I scrape the above web page using R and save the text as CSV in "well-formed" Japanese text rather than something that looks like line noise? Edit: I have added a further screenshot to show what happens when I omit the Encoding step. I get what look like Unicode codes, but not the graphical representation of the characters. So it may be some kind of locale-related issue, but in the exact same locale the Perl script does provide useful output. So this is still puzzling.