unicode characters conversion in R

Question

I have this MTST column, which when printed yields

 [1] \"G          


        

Answer 1

What you have there looks like plain 7-bit ASCII characters with some attempt at encoding Unicode code-points by wrapping some of them thus: .

This is not a recognised encoding for Unicode, as far as I can tell, partly because how would you put a real < in your text? I suppose every < could be where jklm is the code for an angle bracket... But ick.

So, first, try and get a UTF-8 encoded string from whatever generated this ascii-encoded mess!

However... after some serious hair pulling...

stringi to the rescue! Where 'MTST' is your vector of stuff, first convert the angle bracket notation to backslash-u and then use stri_unescape_unicode:

> require(stringi)
> greek2=gsub(">","", gsub(" stri_unescape_unicode(greek2)
[1] "ΑGΡΙΝΙΟ                                 "
[2] "ΑGΧΙΑΛΟS                                "
[3] "ΑΙGΙΝΑ                                  "
[4] "ΑΙGΙΟ                                   "
[5] "ΑΙΔΗΨΟS                                 "
[6] "ΑΚΤΙΟ(ΠΡΕΒΕΖΑ)                          "

all the way up to

[123] "FΥΧΤΙΑ                                  "
[124] "ΧΑΛΚΙΔΑ                                 "
[125] "ΧΑΝΙΑ                                   "
[126] "ΧΙΟS                                    "
[127] "ΧΡΥSΟΥΠΟΛΗ_ΚΑΒΑΛΑ                       "
[128] "OΡΕΟΙ                                   "

once I fixed the bizarrely missing comma and quote mark in your "dput" data (edited your question for you).