R help - Aug 2012 - 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

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$lname, value=TRUE)
> [1] "Fr&egrave;re de Montizon" "Lumi&egrave;re"
> [3] "Lumi&egrave;re"           "Ni&eacute;pce"
> [5] "S&uuml;ssmilch"           "Sch&uuml;pbach"
>  > grep("&", author$birthplace, value=TRUE)
> [1] "Marbach, W&uuml;rttemberg"
> [2] "C&ocirc;te-d&#039;Or"
> [3] "Chalon-sur-Sa&ocirc;ne, Sa&ocirc;ne-et-Loire"
> [4] "Gro&szlig; S&auml;rchen, 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
> 
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