title: Turn Unicode into Umlaut in R on Mac (Facebook Data)
body: <p>I did a lot of research on this and I still can't find a solution to this. </p>
  
  <p>I have extracted data from a German Facebook group that looks like </p>
  
  <pre><code>from_ID         from_name           message                                        created_time
  12334543        Max Muster          Dies war auch eine sehr sch&lt;U+00F6&gt;ne Bucht    2016-01-08T19:00:54+0000
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I understand that <code>&lt;U+00F6&gt;
  </code>
  stands for the German Umlat ö. There are many other examples of Unicode replacing German Umlaute or other language specifc signs (no matter which language).</p>
  
  <p>No matter if I want to do a sentiment analysis or just produce a wordcloud I sometimes have issues with this. In case of the sentiment an issue is that training data is not containing these Unicodes and hence the prediction/classification goes wrong. In case of other text based procedures text cleaning like stopword removal is a problem as stop word lists are also "clean" and do not feature these codes.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any easy way to get rid of this and to make R display the corresponding sign instead of the code? </p>
  
  <p>I tried a lot. My last resort would be a gsub routine. However my data frame includes more than 1 million comments. In addition gsub would be very painful as there seems to be too many Unicodes (if we think of more languages than German).</p>
  
  <p>If I got it right it is also important what kind of computer I am using. It is a MacBook Pro. </p>
  
  <p>Any help here is really really appreciated!! </p>
  
  <p>Thank you a lot for your time and help!</p>