Several character strings can be pushed back on one or more occasions.
  The occasions form a stack, so the first line to be retrieved will be
  the first string from the last call to pushBack.  Lines which
  are pushed back are read prior to the normal input from the
  connection, by the normal text-reading functions such as
  readLines and scan.
Pushback is only allowed for readable connections in text mode.
Not all uses of connections respect pushbacks, in particular the input
  connection is still wired directly, so for example parsing
  commands from the console and scan("") ignore pushbacks on
  stdin.
When character strings with a marked encoding (see
  Encoding) are pushed back they are converted to the
  current encoding if encoding = "".  This may involve
  representing characters as <U+xxxx> if they cannot be
  converted.  They will be converted to UTF-8 if encoding =
  "UTF-8" or left as-is if encoding = "bytes".