Get Text File as Character String

Retrieves a text file from the improve repository and loads it as a character string with metadata including caption and description. All lines are collapsed into a single string with newline separators.

Usage

getTextString(
  ident,
  from = pwd(),
  addAsLink = TRUE,
  caption = "",
  description = "",
  ...
)

Arguments

ident: Path, resource ID, or entity ID of the text file. Can be a relative path (from current step), absolute path, or improve identifier
from: Root path for resolving relative paths. Defaults to pwd() (current step location)
addAsLink: Logical. If TRUE, creates a link in the inventory for provenance tracking. Use improveClean() at workflow end to clean up links
caption: Custom caption text. If empty, defaults to entityID and lastModified timestamp
description: Custom description text. If empty, defaults to filename
...: Additional arguments passed to readLines()

Value

A list object (descriptor) with the following components:

data: Character string containing the complete file contents with lines collapsed using newline (\n) separators
dataType: Character string set to "Text"
path: Character string with local file path
caption: Character string with caption text
description: Character string with description text
Additional metadata fields from the resource descriptor

Details

The function reads all lines from the text file using readLines() and collapses them into a single character string. The returned descriptor integrates with improve's provenance tracking when addAsLink = TRUE. Access the text content via result$data.

References

ics1141

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Load text file from current step
text_desc <- getTextString("report_text.txt")
content <- text_desc$data  # Extract text string

# Load file with custom metadata
script_desc <- getTextString(
  "scripts/analysis.R",
  caption = "Main Analysis Script",
  description = "Primary statistical analysis code"
)
} # }