R text file and text mining...how to load data

Question

I am using the R package tm and I want to do some text mining. This is one document and is treated as a bag of words.

I don't understand the documentation on how to load a text file and to create the necessary objects to start using features such as....

stemDocument(x, language = map_IETF(Language(x)))

So assume that this is my doc "this is a test for R load"

How do I load the data for text processing and to create the object x?

Answer 1

Like @richiemorrisroe I found this poorly documented. Here's how I get my text in to use with the tm package and make the document term matrix:

library(tm) #load text mining library
setwd('F:/My Documents/My texts') #sets R's working directory to near where my files are
a  <-Corpus(DirSource("/My Documents/My texts"), readerControl = list(language="lat")) #specifies the exact folder where my text file(s) is for analysis with tm.
summary(a)  #check what went in
a <- tm_map(a, removeNumbers)
a <- tm_map(a, removePunctuation)
a <- tm_map(a , stripWhitespace)
a <- tm_map(a, tolower)
a <- tm_map(a, removeWords, stopwords("english")) # this stopword file is at C:\Users\[username]\Documents\R\win-library\2.13\tm\stopwords 
a <- tm_map(a, stemDocument, language = "english")
adtm <-DocumentTermMatrix(a) 
adtm <- removeSparseTerms(adtm, 0.75)

In this case you don't need to specify the exact file name. So long as it's the only one in the directory referred to in line 3, it will be used by the tm functions. I do it this way because I have not had any success in specifying the file name in line 3.

If anyone can suggest how to get text into the lda package I'd be most grateful. I haven't been able to work that out at all.