Not sure I have all of my encoding my jargon down right, but...
Let's say you have a character string and you want to replace the non-latin1 characters with its representation in bytes. You do this:
a <- "It’s weird calling a place home when you moved a lot as a kid"
iconv(tweets$text, from = "UTF-8", to = "latin1", sub = "byte")
And get this:
[1] It<e2><80><99>s weird calling a place home when you moved a lot as a kid
Now I want to convert that string back from its encoded version, and in essence return the same string that you had originally. How do you do that?