Converting RTF Files to TXT in R

Recently I downloaded a large number of RTF files. Wanting to analyze this text data in R, I first needed to strip RTF encoding.

In this video I use the striprtf library to loop through a folder of files, convert them to .TXT, and save those .TXT files to another folder. The code is pasted below.

But wait, there’s more! For large jobs it’s nice to get a sense of how things are progressing. So the below example follows the logic of above and prints some progress messages to the console. Read more about monitoring progress in R loops here.