I used readLines from gutenbergr to read my list of legal cases into R. The code looks like this:

my_list <- list.files(path = “C:UsersBen TiceDocumentsR StuffUW JobCasesdatatxts”, pattern = “.txt$”)

cases_lines <- lapply(my_list, readLines)

I can convert individual cases successfully like this:

df_convert <- data.frame(line=1:length(cases_lines[[1]]), text=cases_lines[[1]])

But I would like to be able to use data.frame on all 75 cases without having to convert each one separately.

I tried using the lapply function as well as for loops, but I cannot get either of them to work. For example, df_convert2 <- data.frame(line=1:length(cases_lines[[i]]), text=cases_lines[[i]]) runs but produces the following error message: “Error in cases_lines[[i]] : recursive indexing failed at level 2.”

Ultimately, I need a list of the cases as data frames, so I can iterate through them with stringr functions to look for character patterns.