R's read.csv prepending 1st column name with junk text
byte-order-mark, r, utf-8
Solution
You've got a Unicode UTF-8 BOM at the start of the file:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
A text editor or web browser interpreting the text as ISO-8859-1 or CP1252 will display the characters  for this
R is giving you the ï and then converting the other two into dots as they are non-alphanumeric characters.
Here:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2014-February/370760.html
Duncan Murdoch suggests:
You can declare a file to be in encoding "UTF-8-BOM" if you want to ignore a BOM on input
So try your `read.csv` with `fileEncoding="UTF-8-BOM"` or persuade your SQL wotsit to not output a BOM.
Otherwise you may as well test if the first name starts with `ï..` and strip it with `substr` (as long as you know you'll never have a column that does start like that genuinely...)
Problem
I have exported data from a result grid in SQL Server Management Studio to a csv file. The csv file looks correct. But when I read the data into an R dataframe using read.csv, the first column name is prepended with "ï..". How do I get rid of this junk text? Example: ``` str(trainData) 'data.frame': 64169 obs. of 20 variables: $ ï..Column1 : int 3232... $ Column2 : int 4242... ``` The data looks something like this (nothing special) : Column1,Column2 100116577,100116577 100116698,100116702