readtext

Readtext is a software tool and library used in natural language processing to read text data from a variety of document formats and present it in a single, uniform structure suitable for analysis. The primary aim is to simplify the import of heterogeneous documents so that subsequent processing—tokenization, analysis, and modeling—can proceed without format-specific handling.

In the R ecosystem, readtext refers to the readtext package, which provides a function of the same name. It can ingest whole files or directories containing text documents and returns a tidy data frame (or tibble) with at least an identifier for each document and the extracted text. Supported formats typically include plain text, PDFs, Word (.docx), HTML, XML, JSON, and other common document types, often by delegating to specialized parsers under the hood. The resulting data frame commonly contains columns such as doc_id or docname, text, and optional provenance or metadata extracted from filenames or file properties. This structure integrates smoothly with downstream workflows in quanteda, tidytext, or other NLP toolchains.

Typical considerations include handling of encodings, large file sizes, and missing metadata. The readtext approach emphasizes reproducibility and portability, providing a repeatable path from raw documents to analyzable text.