[R] How to avoid automatic coercion to factor?

[Deepayan Sarkar]

>From ?data.frame:

     Character variables passed to 'data.frame' are converted
     to factor columns unless protected by 'I'. If a list or data frame
     or matrix is passed to 'data.frame' it is as if each column had
     been passed as a separate argument.

See the Examples section for an example.

On Tuesday 02 September 2003 17:30, Dutky, Steve wrote:
> I have a function that manipulates a list of numeric and character
> components of equal length and wants to return a data.frame.
>
> EG,
>
> f<-function() {
> 	a<-list(Int1=1:5,Char1=letters[1:5],Char2=letters[6:10])
> 	b<-data.frame(a)
> }
>
> How can I get the columns Char1, Char2, (...CharN) returned coerced to
> character and not factor?
>
> It appears that I could coerce individual columns by
> b$CharI<-as.character(b$CharI). Is there a less ugly way of doing this?