What does this error mean?

Hi, welcome to the forum.

I think we need a bit more information. At least we need the code you were running at the time you got the error message and what data you were using. Essentially,we need a FAQ: How to do a minimal reproducible example ( reprex ) for beginners

A handy way to supply some sample data is the dput() function. In the case of a large dataset something like dput(head(mydata, 100)) should supply the data we need.

It would be very be very helpful if you could supply the output of

 sessionInfo()

since it looks like an encoding problem.