convert HTML Character Entity Encoding in R

Question

Is there a way in R to convert HTML Character Entity Encodings?

I would like to convert HTML character entities like & to & or > to >

For Perl exists the package HTML::Entities which could do that, but I couldn't find something similar in R.

I also tried iconv() but couldn't get satisfying results. Maybe there is also a way using the XML package but I haven't figured it out yet.

Answer 1

Unescape xml/html values using xml2 package:

unescape_xml <- function(str){
  xml2::xml_text(xml2::read_xml(paste0("<x>", str, "</x>")))
}

unescape_html <- function(str){
  xml2::xml_text(xml2::read_html(paste0("<x>", str, "</x>")))
}

Examples:

unescape_xml("3 < x & x > 9")
# [1] "3 < x & x > 9"
unescape_html("&euro; 2.99")
# [1] "€ 2.99"