On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Wakefield, Thad M. wrote:
> This seems like it should be easy. So I'm suspecting my internet search skills are deficient.
>
> I have a text file with escaped Unicode that I want to convert to plain text.
>
> From: Why We\u2019re in a New Gilded Age
> To: Why We're in a New Gilded Age
Tell us if this works for you:
perl -pe 's/\\u([0-9A-Fa-f]{4})/chr(hex $1)/ge'
It assumes there are always four hexadecimal digits following the "\u".
It will give warnings to stderr about "Wide character in print".
Your example shows conversion to an ordinary apostrophe, like this:
We're
But my code will give you the UTF-8 character U+2019, like this:
We’re
And that is probably what you want.
Mike