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

A use for eval(parse)!

eval(parse(text=paste0("'", x, "'")))

This has its own problems of course, such as having to manually escape any quote marks within the string. But it should work for any valid Unicode sequences that may appear.