Using non-ASCII characters inside functions for packages

Try this:

pounds<-function(x) paste0("\u00A3",x)

The stringi package can be useful is these situations:

library(stringi)

stri_escape_unicode("£")
#> [1] "\\u00a3"

For the \uxxxx escapes, you need to know the hexadecimal number of your character. You can determine it using charToRaw:

sprintf("%X", as.integer(charToRaw("£")))
[1] "A3"

Now you can use this to specify your non-ascii character. Both \u00A3 and £ represent the same character.

Another option is to use stringi::stri_escape_unicode:

library(stringi)
stringi::stri_escape_unicode("➛")
# "\\u279b"

This informs you that "\u279b" represents the character "➛".