How can I change the encoding of a text file that is delimited by pipe and quotes so I can read it into R?

Question

I want to read data from a text file into an R dataframe. The data is delimited by pipes | and also has quotes around the values. I've tried some combinations of read.table but it's importing everything into a single field as opposed to splitting it. The data looks like this:

"CompetitorDataID"|"CompetitorID"|"ItemID"|"UserID"|"CountryID"|"SegmentID"|"TaskID"|"Price"|"Comment"|"CreateDate"|"GeneralCustomer"|"TenderResult"
"29"|"5"|"187630"|"1375"|"5"|"398"|"4085"|"5.000000"|"test"|"2013-01-1002:58:23.230000000"|"False"|"1"
"30"|"5"|"1341"|"1294"|"5"|"398"|"4088"|"6.000000"|"test"|"2013-01-1003:15:26.687000000"|"False"|"1"
"31"|"5"|"1007"|"1375"|"5"|"398"|"4105"|"5.000000"|""|"2013-01-1005:50:51.150000000"|"False"|"1"

Although this code will import when pasted into R it won't work from the original text file. I get the following error message:

Warning messages:
1: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
  line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls
2: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
  line 2 appears to contain embedded nulls
3: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
  line 3 appears to contain embedded nulls
4: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
  line 4 appears to contain embedded nulls
5: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
  line 5 appears to contain embedded nulls
6: In read.table("competitorDataCopy.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "|") :
  line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls
7: In scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec,  :
  embedded nul(s) found in input

Solution

You can easily import a pipe delimited .txt file this way:

file_in <- read.table("C:/example.txt", sep = "|")

That applies for any character separated text files, just change the sep to suit.