chr_unserialise_unicode: Translate unicode points to UTF-8

In rlang: Functions for Base Types and Core R and 'Tidyverse' Features

Translate unicode points to UTF-8

Description

For historical reasons, R translates strings to the native encoding when they are converted to symbols. This string-to-symbol conversion is not a rare occurrence and happens for instance to the names of a list of arguments converted to a call by do.call().

If the string contains unicode characters that cannot be represented in the native encoding, R serialises those as an ASCII sequence representing the unicode point. This is why Windows users with western locales often see strings looking like ⁠<U+xxxx>⁠. To alleviate some of the pain, rlang parses strings and looks for serialised unicode points to translate them back to the proper UTF-8 representation. This transformation occurs automatically in functions like env_names() and can be manually triggered with as_utf8_character() and chr_unserialise_unicode().

Usage

chr_unserialise_unicode(chr)

Arguments

chr	A character vector.

Life cycle

This function is experimental.

Examples

ascii <- "<U+5E78>"
chr_unserialise_unicode(ascii)

identical(chr_unserialise_unicode(ascii), "\u5e78")

rlang documentation built on June 22, 2024, 9:31 a.m.