title: Quickly unescape unicode characters in Swift
body: <p>How do you quickly unescape unicode characters in Swift Strings? Right now, I have an array of strings, and to make it somewhat more user-readable, I added the following code that loops through each String in the array</p>
  
  <pre><code>for i in 0...(titles.count - 1) {
      var s = titles[i]
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("&amp;quot;", withString: "\"")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("&amp;amp;", withString: "&amp;")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00e1", withString: "\u{00e1}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00e9", withString: "\u{00e9}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00e8", withString: "\u{00e8}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00e0", withString: "\u{00e0}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00d8", withString: "\u{00d8}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00c3", withString: "\u{00c3}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00a4", withString: "\u{00a4}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00eb", withString: "\u{00eb}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u2022", withString: "\u{2022}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00c9", withString: "\u{00c9}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00b3", withString: "\u{00b3}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u2019", withString: "\u{2019}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u2730", withString: "\u{2730}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u266b", withString: "\u{266b}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\u00f8", withString: "\u{00f8}")
      s = s.stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString("\\/", withString: "/")
      titles[i] = s
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>For example, on the fifth line, any occurrence of <code>\u00e1</code> is replaced with the corresponding unicode character <code>á</code>.</p>
  
  <p>The array of strings is generated using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>myHTMLString = try NSString(contentsOfURL: url, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Where <code>url = NSURL(string: "http://songa.nl/ajax.php?params=playlist/load/US87OmpN")!</code></p>
  
  <p>and splitting the string in different substrings, when an " is encountered.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a less hack-y (and probably faster), and more generic way to unescape unicode characters?</p>