How to remove strange characters using gsub in R?

Question

I\'m trying to clean up some text that was loaded into memory using readLines(..., encoding=\'UTF-8\').

If I don\'t specify the encoding, I see all kind

Answer 1

The easiest way to get rid of these characters is to convert from utf-8 to ascii:

combined_doc <- iconv(combined_doc, 'utf-8', 'ascii', sub='')