Converting a \u escaped Unicode string to ASCII

r unicode text-processing iconv unicode-string
seancarmody picture seancarmody · Jul 20, 2013 · Viewed 15.2k times · Source

After reading all about iconv and Encoding, I am still confused.

I am scraping the source of a web page I have a string that looks like this: 'pretty\u003D\u003Ebig' (displayed in the R console as 'pretty\\\u003D\\\u003Ebig'). I want to convert this to the ASCII string, which should be 'pretty=>big'.

More simply, if I set

x <- 'pretty\\u003D\\u003Ebig'

How do I perform a conversion on x to yield pretty=>big?

Any suggestions?

Answer

hadley picture hadley · Jul 22, 2013

Use parse, but don't evaluate the results:

x1 <- 'pretty\\u003D\\u003Ebig'
x2 <- parse(text = paste0("'", x1, "'"))
x3 <- x2[[1]]
x3
# [1] "pretty=>big"
is.character(x3)
# [1] TRUE
length(x3)
# [1] 1

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