Removing words and initials with tm

"I suspect that it might have something to do with regular expressions, but to be honest, I'm (currently) pretty crap with those."

I cannot think of a better incentive to take action on this hole in your education and buckle down to learn regular expressions. There are many books and tutorials available.
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On April 10, 2015 3:19:51 AM PDT, Sun Shine <phaedrusv at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi list

Using the tm package, part of the pre-processing work is to remove
words, etc. from the corpus.

I wish to remove people's names and also their initials which are
peppered throughout the corpus. But, because some people's initials are

the same as parts of common words - e.g. 'am' = 'became' => 'bec e' or
'ec' = 'because' => 'b ause' or 'ar' = 'arrival' => 'rival' (which has
a
completely different meaning).

Is there any way of doing this without leaving a trail of nonsense
half-terms behind? I suspect that it might have something to do with
regular expressions, but to be honest, I'm (currently) pretty crap with

those.

Would it make a difference if I removed initials and names *prior* to
converting all text to lower case, so I remove 'AM' and because
'became'
is lower case, it should remain unaffected?

Any recommendations on how best to proceed with this?

Thanks as always.
Sun