Unescape unicode in character string
After playing with this some more I think the best I can do is searching for \uxxxx patterns using a regular expression, and then parse those using the R parser:
unescape_unicode <- function(x){ #single string only stopifnot(is.character(x) && length(x) == 1) #find matches m <- gregexpr("(\\\\)+u[0-9a-z]{4}", x, ignore.case = TRUE) if(m[[1]][1] > -1){ #parse matches p <- vapply(regmatches(x, m)[[1]], function(txt){ gsub("\\", "\\\\", parse(text=paste0('"', txt, '"'))[[1]], fixed = TRUE, useBytes = TRUE) }, character(1), USE.NAMES = FALSE) #substitute parsed into original regmatches(x, m) <- list(p) } x}This seems to work for all cases and I haven't found any odd side effects yet