LexisNexisTools: Working with Files from 'LexisNexis'

My PhD supervisor once told me that everyone doing newspaper analysis starts by writing code to read in files from the 'LexisNexis' newspaper archive (retrieved e.g., from <http://www.nexis.com/> or any of the partner sites). However, while this is a nice exercise I do recommend, not everyone has the time. This package takes TXT files downloaded from the newspaper archive of 'LexisNexis' in Since this package takes in TXT files which are unstructured in the sense that beginning and end of an article are not clearly indicated, the main function lnt_read() relies on certain keywords that signal to R where an article begins, ends and where meta-data is stored. lnt_checkFiles() thus tests if all keywords are in place. Every article in every TXT file should start with "X of X DOCUMENTS" and end with "LANGUAGE:". The end of the metadata is usually indicated by "LENGTH:". Some measures were taken to eliminate problems but where these keywords appear inside an article or headline, test1 or test2 from the lnt_checkFiles() will return FALSE and lnt_read() will not be able to do its job. In these cases, it is recommended to slightly alter the TXT files, e.g. by changing a headline to "language: never stop learning new ones" instead of "LANGUAGE: never stop learning new ones"—as "language:" without capital letters is not picked up by the functions.

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