[R] Removing words and initials with tm

[Jeff Newmiller]

"I suspect that it might have something to do with regular expressions, but to be honest, I'm (currently) pretty crap with those."

I cannot think of a better incentive to take action on this hole in your education and buckle down to learn regular expressions. There are many books and tutorials available.
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On April 10, 2015 3:19:51 AM PDT, Sun Shine <phaedrusv at gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi list
>
>Using the tm package, part of the pre-processing work is to remove 
>words, etc. from the corpus.
>
>I wish to remove people's names and also their initials which are 
>peppered throughout the corpus. But, because some people's initials are
>
>the same as parts of common words - e.g. 'am' = 'became' => 'bec e' or 
>'ec' = 'because' => 'b ause' or 'ar' = 'arrival' => 'rival' (which has
>a 
>completely different meaning).
>
>Is there any way of doing this without leaving a trail of nonsense 
>half-terms behind? I suspect that it might have something to do with 
>regular expressions, but to be honest, I'm (currently) pretty crap with
>
>those.
>
>Would it make a difference if I removed initials and names *prior* to 
>converting all text to lower case, so I remove 'AM' and because
>'became' 
>is lower case, it should remain unaffected?
>
>Any recommendations on how best to proceed with this?
>
>Thanks as always.
>Sun
>
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