[R] type conversion

[jim holtman]

Your data in the dataframe is really a factor; you can see that with
'str'.  Here is an outline of what you can do to remove the extra
characters and then convert to a number.

> x <- data.frame(actual06="$146,990.33")
> str(x)
'data.frame':   1 obs. of  1 variable:
 $ actual06: Factor w/ 1 level "$146,990.33": 1
> typeof(x$actual06)
[1] "integer"
> # need to convert to character and get rid of extra characters
> y <- as.character(x$actual06)
> y
[1] "$146,990.33"
> (z <- gsub("[$,]", "", y))  # now a numeric character string
[1] "146990.33"
> as.numeric(z)
[1] 146990.3
>
>


On 10/17/07, Roger Mason <rmason at esd.mun.ca> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to do arithmetic on numbers extracted from a PostgreSQL
> database, wherein the numbers are stored as type "money".  The
> transcript below illustrates the problem.
>
> > Membersind06 <- sqlQuery(channel,"select * from income where rowname like '%Membersind%'")
> > names(Membersind06)
> [1] "rowname"  "item"     "budget07" "budget08" "actual06"
> > Membersind06$actual06
> [1] $149,625.00
> Levels: $149,625.00
> > typeof(Membersind06$actual06)
> [1] "integer"
> > Membersind06$actual06/10
> [1] NA
> Warning message:
> / not meaningful for factors in: Ops.factor(Membersind06$actual06, 10)
>
> Can someone show me how to convert the quantity stored in
> Membersind06$actual06 to a numeric type such that I can perfor
> arithmetic operations on it?
>
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>


-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem you are trying to solve?