I am trying to read json object in R from file, which contains names and surnames in unicode. Here is the content of the file "x1.json":

```
{"general": {"last_name":
"\u041f\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e", "name":
"\u0412\u0456\u0442\u0430\u043b\u0456\u0439"}}

```

I use `RJSONIO` package and when I declare the JSON object directly, everything goes well:

```
x<-fromJSON('{"general": {"last_name": "\u041f\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e", "name": "\u0412\u0456\u0442\u0430\u043b\u0456\u0439"}}')
x
# $general
# last_name      name 
# "Пащенко" "Віталій" 

```

But when I read the same from file, strings are converted to some unknown for me encoding:

```
x1<-fromJSON("x1.json")
x1
# $general
#    last_name         name 
# "\0370I5=:>" "\022VB0;V9" 

```

Note that these are not escaped "\u" (which [was discussed here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9223795/how-to-correctly-deal-with-escaped-unicode-characters-in-r-e-g-the-em-dash))

I have tried to specify "encoding" argument, but this did not help:

```
> x1<-fromJSON("x1.json", encoding = "UTF-8")
> x1
$general
   last_name         name 
"\0370I5=:>" "\022VB0;V9" 

```

System information:

```
> Sys.getlocale()
[1] "LC_COLLATE=Ukrainian_Ukraine.1251;LC_CTYPE=Ukrainian_Ukraine.1251;LC_MONETARY=Ukrainian_Ukraine.1251;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=Ukrainian_Ukraine.1251"

```

Switching to English (Sys.setlocale("LC\_ALL","English")) has not changed the situation.