CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Barnaby
Barnaby

Reputation: 1480

Importing the contents of a word document into R

I am new to R and have worked for a while as follows. I have the code writen in a word document, then I copy and paste the document with the code into R as to have the code run which works fine, however when the code is long (hundred pages) it takes a significant amount of time in R to start making the code run. This seems rather not a very effective working procedure and I am sure there are other forms to compile the R code.

On another hand one of then that comes to my mind is to import the content of word into R which I am unsure how to do. Have tried with read.table but it does not work, have look on internet as to how to import data, however most explanations are all for data tables etc or internet files in the form of data tables and similar. I have tried saving the document into csv. however word does not include csv have tried with Rich text format and XML package but again the instructions from the packages are for importing tables and similars. I am wondering if there is an effective way for R to import a word document as is in the word document.

Thank you

Upvotes: 1

Views: 7598

Answers (2)

Vee-Why
Vee-Why

Reputation: 76

It's hard to say what the easiest solution would be, without examining the word document. Assuming it only contains code and nothing else, it should be pretty easy to convert it all to plain text from within Word. You can do that by going to File -> Save As, and use 'plain text' under 'Save as type'.

Then edit the filename extension to .R from .txt, download a proper text editor (I can recommend RStudio for R), and open your code in it. Then you will be able to run the code from inside the editor without using copy / paste.

Upvotes: 2

duffymo
duffymo

Reputation: 308998

No, read table won't do it.

Microsoft Word has its own format, which includes a lot of meta data over and above the text you enter into it. You'll need a reader/parser that understands the Word format.

A Java developer would use a library like Apache POI to read and parse it into word tokens and n-grams.

Look for Natural Language Processing tools, like this R module:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html

Upvotes: 1

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