Coverting unicode codeepoint format

Question

Let's say that I have a character string containing bytes representing an emoji:

string <- "This is a test. U+1F600"

How can I transform it into

string <- "This is a test. \U0001F600"

So that I can render it as

utf8_print("This is a test \U0001F600")
[1] "This is a test "

Possible duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29265172/print-unicode-character-string-in-r — Jason, Jan 04 '18 at 23:40

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 05 '18 at 16:21

1

This is kind of a hack, but it works for your case:

string <- c("This is a test. U+1F600", "Another test")

# change U+XXXXYYYY to \UXXXXYYYY, quote and encode special characters
expr <- gsub("U[+]([0-9A-Fa-f]{1,8})", "\\\\U\\1",
             encodeString(string, quote = '"'))

# evaluate the string as an R expression
vapply(parse(text = expr, keep.source = FALSE), eval, "")
#> [1] "This is a test. \U0001f600" "Another test"

answered Jan 05 '18 at 16:21

Patrick Perry

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Wow! This is perfect. One more question. How would I render the shrugface emoji which isn't represented in unicode but by `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`? – Christopher Costello Jan 05 '18 at 19:38
That seems like an unrelated question that you should ask separately to make it easier for others to find the answer. – Patrick Perry Jan 07 '18 at 16:59

Coverting unicode codeepoint format

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