How to read a text file in R as one line

Question

I am trying to process a text file. Overall I have a Corpus that I would like to analyze. In order to use the tm package (a text mining package in R) to create a Corpus object I need to make this paragraph to become one gigantic vector in order to be read properly.

I have a paragraph

          Commercial exploitation over the past two hundred years drove                  
          the great Mysticete whales to near extinction.  Variation in                   
          the sizes of populations prior to exploitation, minimal                        
          population size during exploitation and current population                     
          sizes permit analyses of the effects of differing levels of                    
          exploitation on species with different biogeographical                         
          distributions and life-history characteristics.

I've used both the scan and readLine methods and it processes the text like this:

[28] " commercial exploitation over the past two hundred years drove "
[29] " the great mysticete whales to near extinction variation in "
[30] " the sizes of populations prior to exploitation minimal "

Is there a way to get rid of the line breaks? Or to read the text file as one gigantic vector?

All of the solution posted have been great so far thank you.

Answer 1

This will read the entire file into a length one character vector.

x <- readChar(file, file.info(file)$size)