CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rurldecode
user2844910
user2844910

Reputation: 77

Decoding URL character string vector in R

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.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2916

Answers (2)

akuiper
akuiper

Reputation: 214957

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"

Upvotes: 2

Raffael
Raffael

Reputation: 20045

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"

Upvotes: 4

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