title: Reading files with non-ASCII characters in their names on Windows
body: <p>I want to process a large number of files with R, and some of the files contain non-ASCII characters in their names as in the following.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>2002_88_2_Stępniewski.txt</li>
  <li>2003_100_2-3_Saı̈dou.txt</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>However, I cannot read the file names properly with <code>list.files()</code>.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; (files &lt;- list.files("~/files", full.names = TRUE))   
  [1] "C:\\Users\\murakama\\Documents/files/2002_88_2_Stepniewski.txt"
  [2] "C:\\Users\\murakama\\Documents/files/2003_100_2-3_Sai¨dou.txt" 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Naturally, I cannot read the files based on the names, either.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; scan(files[1])
  Error in file(file, "r") : cannot open the connection
  In addition: Warning message:
  In file(file, "r") :
    cannot open file 'C:\Users\murakama\Documents/files/2002_88_2_Stepniewski.txt': No such file or directory
  
  &gt; scan(files[2])
  Error in file(file, "r") : cannot open the connection
  In addition: Warning message:
  In file(file, "r") :
    cannot open file 'C:\Users\murakama\Documents/files/2003_100_2-3_Sai¨dou.txt': No such file or directory
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The issue is unique to running R on Windows, as it does not occur when I run R on Mac. Does anyone know how to read these files in Windows' R? </p>