Unable replace \x.. sequence from a twitter feed in R

Question

I've been grappling with regex in following string:

"Just beautiful, let’s see how the next few days go. \n\nLong term buying opportunities could be around the corner \xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb2\xb0\xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb3\x89\xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb2\xb8... https://t dot co/hUradDaNVX"

1. I am unable to remove the entire \x...\x pattern from the above string.
2. I'm unable to remove https URL from above string.

My regex expression are:

gsub('http.* *', '', twts_array)
gsub("\\x.*\\x..","",twts_array)

My output is:

"Just beautiful let’s see how the next few days go \n\nLong term buying opportunities could be around the corner \xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb2\xb0\xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb3\x89\xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb2\xb8... httpstcohUradDaNVX"

My expected output is:

Just beautiful, let’s see how the next few days go. Long term buying opportunities could be around the corner 

P.S: As you can see neither of problems got solved. I also added dot for . in https://t dot co/hUradDaNVX as StackOverflow does not allow me to post shortened urls. Can some one help me in tackling this problem.

Answer 1

On Linux you can do the following:

twts_array <- "Just beautiful, let’s see how the next few days go. \n\nLong term buying opportunities could be around the corner \xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb2\xb0\xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb3\x89\xed\xa0\xbd\xed\xb2\xb8... https://t dot co/hUradDaNVX"

twts_array_str <- enc2utf8(twts_array)
twts_array_str <- gsub('<..>', '', twts_array_str)
twts_array_str <- gsub('http.*', '', twts_array_str)

twts_array_str
# "Just beautiful, let’s see how the next few days go. \n\nLong term buying opportunities could be around the corner ... "

enc2utf8 will convert any unknown Unicode sequences to <..> format. Then it will be replaced by gsub with URL as well.