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

Update: this answer is outdated. Please check the answer below based on the new xml2 pkg.

---

Try something along the lines of:

# load XML package
library(XML)

# Convenience function to convert html codes
html2txt <- function(str) {
      xpathApply(htmlParse(str, asText=TRUE),
                 "//body//text()", 
                 xmlValue)[[1]] 
}

# html encoded string
( x <- paste("i", "s", "n", "&", "a", "p", "o", "s", ";", "t", sep = "") )
[1] "isn&apos;t"

# converted string
html2txt(x)
[1] "isn't"

UPDATE: Edited the html2txt() function so it applies to more situations