It is an encoding problem.
For example :

 x1=  "L\374ck"
 x2 = "L\303\274ck"
 identical(iconv(x2,"UTF-8","UTF-8"),x1)
 [1] "TRUE"


So you can try this for example before applying merge : 

 df2name &lt;- iconv(df2$name,'UTF-8','UTF-8')


Encoding of Umlauts while importing into R tables
I have a very annoying message being output from a process I'm running. I'd rather not remove the line, but simply remove it with grep

The messages to ignore all contain the word "requests". I could easily ONLY these lines with

$&gt; myproc | grep requests


How would I make grep instead IGNORE lines with the word requests?
