DZone
Big Data Zone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
  • Refcardz
  • Trend Reports
  • Webinars
  • Zones
  • |
    • Agile
    • AI
    • Big Data
    • Cloud
    • Database
    • DevOps
    • Integration
    • IoT
    • Java
    • Microservices
    • Open Source
    • Performance
    • Security
    • Web Dev
DZone > Big Data Zone > Reading and Text Mining a PDF-File in R

Reading and Text Mining a PDF-File in R

Kay Cichini user avatar by
Kay Cichini
·
Sep. 30, 12 · Big Data Zone · Interview
Like (1)
Save
Tweet
20.98K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

Here is an R-script that reads a PDF-file to R and does some text mining with it:

# here is a pdf for mining
url <- "http://www.noisyroom.net/blog/RomneySpeech072912.pdf"
dest <- tempfile(fileext = ".pdf")
download.file(url, dest, mode = "wb")

# set path to pdftotxt.exe and convert pdf to text
exe <- "C:\\Program Files\\xpdfbin-win-3.03\\bin32\\pdftotext.exe"
system(paste("\"", exe, "\" \"", dest, "\"", sep = ""), wait = F)

# get txt-file name and open it
filetxt <- sub(".pdf", ".txt", dest)
shell.exec(filetxt); shell.exec(filetxt) # strangely the first try always throws an error..

# do something with it, i.e. a simple word cloud
library(tm)
library(wordcloud)
library(Rstem)

txt <- readLines(filetxt) # don't mind warning..

txt <- tolower(txt)
txt <- removeWords(txt, c("\\f", stopwords()))

corpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(txt))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation)
tdm <- TermDocumentMatrix(corpus)
m <- as.matrix(tdm)
d <- data.frame(freq = sort(rowSums(m), decreasing = TRUE))

# Stem words
d$stem <- wordStem(row.names(d), language = "english")

# and put words to column, otherwise they would be lost when aggregating
d$word <- row.names(d)

# remove web address (very long string):
d <- d[nchar(row.names(d)) < 20, ]

# aggregate freqeuncy by word stem and
# keep first words..
agg_freq <- aggregate(freq ~ stem, data = d, sum)
agg_word <- aggregate(word ~ stem, data = d, function(x) x[1])

d <- cbind(freq = agg_freq[, 2], agg_word)

# sort by frequency
d <- d[order(d$freq, decreasing = T), ]

# print wordcloud:
wordcloud(d$word, d$freq)

# remove files
file.remove(dir(tempdir(), full.name=T)) # remove files

 

R (programming language) Text mining Mining (military)

Published at DZone with permission of Kay Cichini, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Popular on DZone

  • Which Backend Frameworks Are Impacting Web App Development Immensely?
  • Monolith vs Microservices Architecture: To Split or Not to Split?
  • What I Miss in Java, the Perspective of a Kotlin Developer
  • Migrating Legacy Applications and Services to Low Code

Comments

Big Data Partner Resources

X

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Careers
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • MVB Program
  • Become a Contributor
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 600 Park Offices Drive
  • Suite 300
  • Durham, NC 27709
  • support@dzone.com
  • +1 (919) 678-0300

Let's be friends:

DZone.com is powered by 

AnswerHub logo