[R] How to read plain text documents into a vector?

[Paul Hiemstra]

Richard Liu wrote:
> I'm new to R.  I'm working with the text mining package tm.  I have several
> plain text documents in a directory, and I would like to read all the files
> with extension .txt in that directory into a vector, one text document per
> vector element.  That is, v[1] would be the first document, v[2] the second,
> etc.
>
> I know how to read the documents into a tm Corpus, but that's not what I
> want to do.  I would think that this kind of operation should be elementary
> and the first step in any text mining.
>
> Thanks,
> Richard
>   
Hi Richard,

Try somthing along these lines:

file_list = list.files("/where/are/the/files")
obj_list = lapply(file_list, FUN = yourfunction)

yourfunction is probably either read.table or some read function from 
the tm package. So obj_list will become a list of either data.frame's or 
tm objects.

cheers,
Paul

-- 
Drs. Paul Hiemstra
Department of Physical Geography
Faculty of Geosciences
University of Utrecht
Heidelberglaan 2
P.O. Box 80.115
3508 TC Utrecht
Phone:  +3130 274 3113 Mon-Tue
Phone:  +3130 253 5773 Wed-Fri
http://intamap.geo.uu.nl/~paul