translating HTML character entities to accented characters

It's not quite an R solution, but I just pasted your examples into a script
window in R and saved it as chars.html. Then I opened it in Firefox and
pasted the results here (with returns inserted to match your original).

grep("&", author$lname, value=TRUE)

[1] "Fr?re de Montizon" "Lumi?re"
[3] "Lumi?re" "Ni?pce"
[5] "S?ssmilch" "Sch?pbach"

grep("&", author$birthplace, value=TRUE)

[1] "Marbach, W?rttemberg"
[2] "C?te-d'Or"
[3] "Chalon-sur-Sa?ne, Sa?ne-et-Loire"
[4] "Gro? S?rchen, Germany"

apropos("HTML")

For a CSV file you would want to preserve the lines by adding <br> to the
end of each line first.

----------------------------------------------
David L Carlson
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-4352

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-
project.org] On Behalf Of Michael Friendly
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 11:15 AM
To: R-help
Subject: [R] translating HTML character entities to accented characters

I've imported a .csv file where character strings that contained
accented characters were written as HTML
character entities.  Is there a function that works on a vector to
translate them back to accented (latin1) characters?

Some examples:

  > grep("&", author$lname, value=TRUE)

[1] "Frère de Montizon" "Lumière"
[3] "Lumière"           "Niépce"
[5] "Süssmilch"           "Schüpbach"

  > grep("&", author$birthplace, value=TRUE)

[1] "Marbach, Württemberg"
[2] "Côte-d'Or"
[3] "Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire"
[4] "Groß Särchen, Germany"

  > apropos("HTML")

thx,
-Michael

--
Michael Friendly     Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
Professor, Psychology Dept.
York University      Voice: 416 736-2100 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814
4700 Keele Street    Web:   http://www.datavis.ca
Toronto, ONT  M3J 1P3 CANADA