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

I sympathise; I have struggled with R and unicode text in the past and not always successfully. If your data is in x then first try a global replace, something like this:

x <- gsub("\u003D", "=>", x)

I sometimes use a construction like

lapply(x, utf8ToInt)

to see where the high code points are e.g. anything over 150. This helps me locate problems caused by non-breaking spaces, for example, which seem to pop up every now and again.