# Convert ASCII Characters to Mathematica Input Form

I have the following pure ASCII character list:

list ={"a", "\\:1d62", "\\:2081", "\\[Beta]", "\\:2081", " ", "+", " ", \
"a", "\\:1d62", "\\:2082", "\\[Beta]", "\\:2082", " ", "+", " ", ".", \
".", ".", " ", "+", " ", "a", "\\:2099", "\\:2081", "\\[Beta]", \
"\\:2099", " ", "=", " ", "b", "\\:1d62"}


How can I convert it to Mathematica Input Form ?

I tried: FromCharacterCode[ToString[#, "ASCII"] &/@list

But it does not work.

• You should be converting hex to decimal first before applying FromCharacterCode[]: FromCharacterCode[16^^1d62] – J. M.'s technical difficulties Oct 16 '18 at 13:13
• Or ToExpression["\\:1d62"]. – Rohit Namjoshi Oct 16 '18 at 14:33
• Do you want the output to be symbols or strings? Should it be a or "a"? Should it be \[Beta] or "[Beta]"? I assume it should be strings, otherwise you will have a mixture of strings and symbols, since there is no expression that matches " " or "+". – Carl Woll Oct 16 '18 at 15:10
• @CarlWoll The answer to this question is exactly what I was looking for. Do you think that one could use this to automate this question: mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/183981/… – james Oct 16 '18 at 15:30

As @Rohit suggests in the comments, one possibility is to use ToExpression. However, to be safer, one might want to use Symbol instead. So:
Replace[