Library and common commands to clean and manipulate free text data

free text manipulation

library(stringr)

df$NOTE = str_replace_all(df$NOTE,"\\n"," ") # Removes new line characters
df$NOTE = str_replace_all(df$NOTE,"\\r"," ") # Removes carriage returns
df$NOTE = str_replace_all(df$NOTE,"\\s+"," ") # Replaces two or more spaces with a single space

df$STRIPPED_NOTE = str_replace_all(df$STRIPPED_NOTE, fixed("Travel,"), " ") 
# Faster because it explicitly looks for a fixed text string rather than a regexp

str_detect(df$NOTE,fixed("Family's future,")) # To create a flag if string present rather than mutate string

# Hack to estimate word count in a text sample
df$WORD_COUNT = sapply(gregexpr("\\W+", df$NOTE), length) + 1
df$WORD_COUNT[df$NOTE == ""] = 0