[R] How to avoid automatic coercion to factor?

[Marc Schwartz]

On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 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?
> 
> Thanks, Steve Dutky


Steve,

Try this:

f<-function() { 
   a <- list(Int1 = 1:5, Char1 = letters[1:5], Char2 = letters[6:10])
   b <- data.frame(I(a))
}

and note the use of I(a) to inhibit the conversion of character vectors
to factors.

I presume that you are doing more in your function than what you have
above...

See ?data.frame and ?I (AsIs) for additional information.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz