Importar bytes sin procesar como bytes sin procesar en R

Esto funciona para convertir una cadena de un solo carácter del tipo que ha descrito en un vector de raws.

## The string I think you're talking about
dat <- "\\x1f8b080000000000"
cat(dat, "\n")
## \x1f8b080000000000

## A function to convert one string to an array of raw
f <- function(x)  {
    ## Break into two-character segments
    x <- strsplit(x, "(?<=.{2})", perl=TRUE)[[1]]
    ## Remove the first element, "\\x"
    x <- x[-1]
    ## Complete the conversion
    as.raw(as.hexmode(x))
}

## Check that it works
f(dat)
##  [1] 1f 8b 08 00 00 00 00 00