readline is considering every record in the spreadsheet as a new line [R] - r

Question

I am trying to create a function that will calculate the frequency count of keywords using TM package. The function works fine if the text pasted from readline is on free form text without a new line. The problem is, when I paste a bunch of text copied from a spreadsheet, readline considers it as a new line.
keyword <- function() {
x <- readline(as.character('Input text here: '))
x <- Corpus(VectorSource(x))
...
tdm <- TermDocumentMatrix(x)
...
tdm
}
Here's the full code: https://github.com/CSCDataAnalytics/PM-Analysis/blob/master/Keyword.R
How can I prevent this from happening or at least consider a bunch of text of every row from the spreadsheet as one vector only?

Answer 1

If I'm understanding you correctly, the problem is when the user pastes the text from another application: the newline is causing R to stop accepting the subsequent lines.
One technique (fragile as it may be) is to look for a specific line, such as an empty line "" or a period ".". It's a little fragile because now you need (1) assurance that the data will "never" include that as a whole line, and (2) it is easily appended by the user.
Try:
endofinput <- ""
totalstr <- ""
while(! endofinput == (x <- readline('prompt (empty string when done): ')))
totalstr <- paste(totalstr, x)
In this case, the empty string is the catch, and when the while loop is done, totalstr contains all input separated by a space (this can be changed in the paste function).
NB: one problem with this technique is that it is "growing" the vector totalstr, which will eventually cause performance penalties (depending on the size of the input data): every loop iteration, more memory is allocated and the entire string is copied plus the new line of text. There are more verbose ways to side-step this problem (e.g., pre-allocate a vector larger than your anticipated input data), but if you aren't anticipated 1000s of lines then you may be able to accept this naive programming for simplicity.
Another option would be to have the user save the data to a text file and use file.choose() and readLines() to get your data.

Answer 2

Try collapsing the data into a single string after using readline
x <- paste(readline(as.character('Input text here: ')), collapse=' ')