The behavior depends on the specific locale. When these characters are
deparsed in a Chinese locale, they work fine, but in an English
locale, they will get escaped:
> x <- "I like \u5BFF\u53F8"
> x
[1] "I like 寿司"
> deparse(x)
[1] "\"I like 寿司\""
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.1 (2014-07-10)
Platf
In both R and JSON (and many other languages), unicode characters can
be escaped using a backslash followed by a lowercase "u" and a 4 digit
hex code. However when deparsing a character vector in R on Windows,
the non-latin characters get escaped as "":
> x <- "I like \u5BFF\u53F8"
> cat(x)
I like
