[R] Creating a data.frame
(Ted Harding)
Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk
Thu Feb 14 00:24:35 CET 2008
On 13-Feb-08 22:17:32, Joe Trubisz wrote:
> OK...newbie question here.
> Either I'm reading the docs wrong, or I'm totally confused.
> Given the following:
>
> x<-c("aaa","bbb","ccc")
> y<-rep(0,3)
> z<-rep(0,3)
>
> is.character(x)
> [1] TRUE
>
> is.numeric(y)
> [1] TRUE
>
> Now...I want to create a data frame, but keep the data types.
> In reading the docs, I assume you do it this way:
>
> d<-data.frame(cbind(x=I(x),y=y,z=z)
>
> But, when I do str(d), I get the following:
>
> 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 3 variables:
> $ x: Factor w/ 3 levels "aaa","bbb","ccc": 1 2 3
> $ y: Factor w/ 1 level "0": 1 1 1
> $ z: Factor w/ 1 level "0": 1 1 1
>
> I thought the I() prevents character from becoming factors, right?
> Secondly, how do I force y and z in the data frame to become numeric?
>
> Thanks in advance
> Joe
You don't need to force it! It's not obvious what made you
think of using cbind() internally, but it doesn't do what
you intended. Simply:
d<-data.frame(x=I(x),y=y,z=z)
d
# x y z
# 1 aaa 0 0
# 2 bbb 0 0
# 3 ccc 0 0
str(d)
# 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 3 variables:
# $ x:Class 'AsIs' chr [1:3] "aaa" "bbb" "ccc"
# $ y: num 0 0 0
# $ z: num 0 0 0
The trouble was that cbind(x=I(x),y=y,z=z) makes a matrix,
and you cannot mix types in a matrix, so this will coerce
all the variables to character type. So it's your original
way which does the forcing!
Hoping this helps,
Ted.
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Date: 13-Feb-08 Time: 23:24:30
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