How to remove unicode <U+00A6> from string?

I just want to remove unicode <U+00A6> which is at the beginning of string.

Then you do not need a gsub, you can use a sub with "^\\s*<U\\+\\w+>\\s*" pattern:

q <-"<U+00A6>  1000-66329"
sub("^\\s*<U\\+\\w+>\\s*", "", q)

Pattern details:

• ^ - start of string
• \\s* - zero or more whitespaces
• <U\\+ - a literal char sequence <U+
• \\w+ - 1 or more letters, digits or underscores
• > - a literal >
• \\s* - zero or more whitespaces.

If you also need to replace the - with a space, add |- alternative and use gsub (since now we expect several replacements and the replacement must be a space - same is in akrun's answer):

trimws(gsub("^\\s*<U\\+\\w+>|-", " ", q))

See the R online demo

If always is the first character, you can try:

substring("\U00A6 1000-66B29", 2)

if R prints the string as <U+00A6> 1000-66329 instead of ¦ 1000-66B29 then <U+00A6> is interpreted as the string "<U+00A6>" instead of the unicode character. Then you can do:

substring("<U+00A6>  1000-66329",9)

Both ways the result is:

[1] "  1000-66329"

We can also do

trimws(gsub("\\S+\\s+|-", " ", q))
#[1] "1000 66329"

Instead of removing you should convert it to the appropriate format ... You have to set your local to UTF-8 like so:

Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "en_US.UTF-8")

Maybe you will see the following message:

Warning message:
In Sys.setlocale("LC_CTYPE", "en_US.UTF-8") :
  OS reports request to set locale to "en_US.UTF-8" cannot be honored

In this case you should use stringi::stri_trans_general(x, "zh")

Here "zh" means "chinese". You should know which language you have to convert to. That's it