Find the most frequently occuring words in a text in R

Question

Can someone help me with how to find the most frequently used two and three words in a text using R?

My text is...

text <- c(\"Th         


        

Answer 1

Here's a simple base R approach for the 5 most frequent words:

head(sort(table(strsplit(gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", text), " ")), decreasing = TRUE), 5)

#     a    the     of     in phrase 
#    21     18     12     10      8 

What it returns is an integer vector with the frequency count and the names of the vector correspond to the words that were counted.

• gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", text) to remove punctuation since you don't want to count that, I guess
• strsplit(gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", text), " ") to split the string on spaces
• table() to count unique elements' frequency
• sort(..., decreasing = TRUE) to sort them in decreasing order
• head(..., 5) to select only the top 5 most frequent words