'Embedded nul in string' error when importing csv with fread

We can remove the null terminators on the command line using something like:

sed 's/\\0//g' mycsv.csv > mycsv.csv

Or as suggested by @marbel, fread allows you to pass the sed call inside the text. Such as:

fread("sed 's/\\0//g' mycsv.csv")

In this case, you can use read.csv with fileEncoding of UTF-16LE rather than fread.

read.csv("mycsv.csv",fileEncoding="UTF-16LE")

Considering your data size, using read.csv would take a couple of minutes, but I think it is not a big deal.