Converting a \u escaped Unicode string to ASCII

Question

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 thi

Answer 1

Although I have accepted Hong ooi's answer, I can't help thinking parse and eval is a heavyweight solution. Also, as pointed out, it is not secure, although for my application I can be confident that I will not get dangerous quotes.

So, I have devised an alternative, somewhat brutal, approach:

udecode <- function(string){
  uconv <- function(chars) intToUtf8(strtoi(chars, 16L))
  ufilter <- function(string) {
    if (substr(string, 1, 1)=="|") uconv(substr(string, 2, 5)) else string
  }
  string <- gsub("\\\\u([[:xdigit:]]{4})", ",|\\1,", string, perl=TRUE)
  strings <- unlist(strsplit(string, ","))
  string <- paste(sapply(strings, ufilter), collapse='')
  return(string)
}

Any simplifications welcomed!