Unable to change encoding in data frame in R

Question

I am trying to import a database into R in order to convert and load back to another database. I pull my set from RDS Mysql with:

con <- dbConnect(MySQL(),
                   user = 'user',
                   password = 'password',
                   host = 'url',
                   dbname='dbName')

sqlcmd = paste("SELECT * FROM dbName.`users`");

contentTable = dbGetQuery(con,sqlcmd);

contentTable["first_name"]

which passes me this unsuccessful conclusion

  first_name
1     Sergio
2       Sara
3   J\xfalia
4    Tatiana
5      Paula

My problem is that the third name should be coming back as Julia. This problem has occurred on other lines as well.

My locale is set as follows.

> Sys.getlocale()
[1] "pt_PT.UTF-8/pt_PT.UTF-8/pt_PT.UTF-8/C/pt_PT.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8"

and the default character for the server

# Variable_name, Value
'character_set_client', 'utf8'
'character_set_connection', 'utf8'
'character_set_database', 'utf8'
'character_set_filesystem', 'binary'
'character_set_results', 'utf8'
'character_set_server', 'latin1'
'character_set_system', 'utf8'
'character_sets_dir', '/rdsdbbin/oscar-5.6.10a.14.15/share/charsets/'

I got a little lost and am going to switch to Python / Panda (which gave me the correct characters, but I have a little learning curve to look at what I want to do next). Any idea what to do now?

Update1:

SHOW CREATE TABLE users;
CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `first_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `last_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `email` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `birthday` date DEFAULT NULL,
  `age` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `city` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `state` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `country` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `beer_points` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `access_token` text,
  `created_at` datetime NOT NULL,
  `updated_at` datetime NOT NULL,
  `profile_picture_file_name` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `profile_picture_content_type` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `profile_picture_file_size` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `profile_picture_updated_at` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `role` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `password_digest` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `gender` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `share_code` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `privacy_enabled` tinyint(1) DEFAULT '0',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `index_users_on_email` (`email`),
  KEY `index_users_on_role` (`role`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=46 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

Answer 1

:

 con <- dbConnect(MySQL(),
               user = 'user',
               password = 'password',
               host = 'url',
               dbname='dbName')
 m <- dbGetQuery(con, "SET NAMES 'latin1'")
 sqlcmd <- paste("SELECT * FROM dbName.`users`");
 result <- dbGetQuery(con, sqlcmd)
 dbDisconnect(con)