Decoding URL character string vector in R

Question

Suppose you have an atomic vector containing URL encoded character strings.

For example:

urlencoded<-c("im%20looking%20for%20uncle","im%20looking%20for%20sister")

Is there any way to decode every element in the vector, returning a vector of the same length with regular text?

In other words, the output should be:

c("im looking for uncle","im looking for sister")

URLdecode in base R doesn't vectorize and it's slow. There are lots of utilities outside of R that quickly decode URL encoded character strings, but I can't find any good utility in R.

Raffael · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-20 09:44:37Z

4

You can apply a function to a vector with sapply. It will return the result vector:

> urlencoded <- c("im%20looking%20for%20uncle", "im%20looking%20for%20sister")
> sapply(urlencoded, URLdecode, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
[1] "im looking for uncle"  "im looking for sister"

answered Nov 20, 2013 at 9:44

Raffael

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akuiper · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-12 18:29:21Z

2

For those who don't yet know, there's urltools package that has the vectorized url_decode and url_encode:

library(urltools)

urlencoded <- c("im%20looking%20for%20uncle","im%20looking%20for%20sister")
url_decode(urlencoded)
# [1] "im looking for uncle"  "im looking for sister"

url_encode(c("im looking for uncle", "im looking for sister"))
# [1] "im%20looking%20for%20uncle"  "im%20looking%20for%20sister"

answered Jul 12, 2017 at 18:29

akuiper

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