title: Emoticons in Twitter Sentiment Analysis in r
body: <p>How do I handle/get rid of emoticons so that I can sort tweets for sentiment analysis?</p>
  
  <p>Getting:
  Error in sort.list(y) : 
    invalid input </p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>
  
  <p>and this is how the emoticons come out looking from twitter and into r:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\xed��\xed�\u0083\xed��\xed��
  \xed��\xed�\u008d\xed��\xed�\u0089 
  </code></pre>