Category "iso-8859-1"

Which is the correct encoding for a degree character?

I have a line of code that alters text temperature<-as.numeric(gsub("°.*","",temp)) R does not like the "°" character. When I save the file it says

Writing ISO8859 data to MySQL in R (error:"could not run statement: Invalid utf8 character string")

I need to import an SAS Transfer File (.xpt) to MySQL. Because I don't own SAS, I tried a) first importing the .xpt in R b) then using dbWriteTable from the li