Converting a \u escaped Unicode string to ASCII
iconv, r, text-processing, unicode, unicode-string
Solution
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
Problem
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?