Text mining is an increasingly important research field because of the necessity of obtaining knowledge from the enormous number of text documents available, especially on the Web. Text mining and data mining, both included in the field of information mining, are similar in some sense, and thus it may seem that data mining techniques may be adapted in a straightforward way to mine text. However, data mining deals with structured data, whereas text presents special characteristics and is basically unstructured. In this context, the aims of this paper are three:

–	To study particular features of text.
–	To identify the patterns we may look for in text.
–	To discuss the tools we may use for that purpose.