Removing “NUL” characters (within R)

I've got a strange text file with a bunch of NUL characters in it (actually about 10 such files), and I'd like to programmatically replace them from within R. Here is a link to one of the files. With the aid of this question I've finally figured out a better-than-ad-hoc way of going into each file and find-and-replacing the nuisance characters. It turns out that each pair of them should correspond to one space ([NUL][NUL]->) to maintain the intended line width of the file (which is crucial for reading these as fixed-width further down the road).

However, for robustness' sake, I prefer a more automable approach to the solution, ideally (for organization's sake) something I could add at the beginning of an R script I'm writing to clean up the files. This question looked promising but the accepted answer is insufficient - readLines throws an error whenever I try to use it on these files (unless I activate skipNul).

Is there any way to get the lines of this file into R so I could use gsub or whatever else to fix this issue without resorting to external programs?

You want to read the file as binary then you can substitute the NULs, e.g. to replace them by spaces:

r = readBin("00staff.dat", raw(), file.info("00staff.dat")$size)
r[r==as.raw(0)] = as.raw(0x20) ## replace with 0x20 = <space>
writeBin(r, "00staff.txt")
str(readLines("00staff.txt"))
#  chr [1:155432] "000540952Anderson            Shelley J       FW1949     2000R000000000000119460007620            3  0007000704002097907KGKG1616"| __truncated__ ...

You could also substitute the NULs with a really rare character (such as "\01") and work on the string in place, e.g., let's say if you want to replace two NULs ("\00\00") with one space:

r = readBin("00staff.dat", raw(), file.info("00staff.dat")$size)
r[r==as.raw(0)] = as.raw(1)
a = gsub("\01\01", " ", rawToChar(r), fixed=TRUE)
s = strsplit(a, "\n", TRUE)[[1]]
str(s)
# chr [1:155432] "000540952Anderson            Shelley J       FW1949     2000R000000000000119460007620            3  0007000704002097907KGKG1616"| __truncated__