Emoticons in Twitter Sentiment Analysis in r

Question

How do I handle/get rid of emoticons so that I can sort tweets for sentiment analysis?

Getting: Error in sort.list(y) : invalid input

Thanks

and

Answer 1

You can use regular expression to detect non-alphabet characters and remove them. Sample code:

rmNonAlphabet <- function(str) {
  words <- unlist(strsplit(str, " "))
  in.alphabet <- grep(words, pattern = "[a-z|0-9]", ignore.case = T)
  nice.str <- paste(words[in.alphabet], collapse = " ")
  nice.str
}