[R] Inverse of encodeString

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Alberto Monteiro wrote:

> What is the inverse of encodeString?
>
> For example, \u1 is some Unicode symbol. If I do
>
> s <- encodeString("\u1")
>
> then s will be the string "\001". But anything I do
> with s, will not return the Unicode that corresponds to \u1:
>
> cat(s, "\n") # prints \001
> cat("\u1", "\n")  # prints y with umlaut

Not on a properly operational UTF-8 system: your terminal has a problem.

The help says

      'encodeString' escapes the strings in a character vector in the
      same way 'print.default' does, and optionally fits the encoded
      strings within a field width.

The printed representation is not necessarily invertible, but scan() would 
be a good start:

> scan(con<-textConnection(s), "", allowEscapes=TRUE); close(con)
Read 1 item
[1] "\001"

as might parse(text=) be.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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