These angle brackets are how R handles printing some Unicode to stdout on windows. In memory it should be regular Unicode though. The mistake they made is a cl

These angle brackets are how R handles printing some Unicode to stdout on windows. In memory it should be regular Unicode though. The mistake they made is a classic R footgun: the fileEncoding argument to write.table() controls the encoding of the filename, not its contents. You either have to control the encoding of the files by manually creating the connection through file() or ideally just use the readr or data.table libraries. Base R makes a lot of Unixy assumptions when it comes to text, so it's not pleasant to work with on Windows. The package ecosystem has solved most of these problems though.