The textreadr package aims to be a lightweight tool kit that handles 80% of an analyst’s text reading in needs.

The package handles .docx, .doc, .pdf, .html, .pptx, and .txt.

If you have another format there is likely already another popular R package that specializes in this read in task. For example, got XML, use the xml2 package, authored by Hadley Wickham, Jim Hester, & Jeroen Ooms. Need special handling for .html? Use Hadley Wickham’s rvest package. Got SQL? Oh boy there’s a bunch of great ways to read it into R.

R Package SQL
ROBDC Microsoft SQL Server
RMySQL MySQL
ROracle Oracle
RJDBC JDBC