[R] How avoid coercion to character

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 14:45:14 -0300, Eduardo Dutra de Armas
<edarmas at carpa.ciagri.usp.br> wrote :

>Hi R-users!
>I'd like to know how to avoid automatic coercion of numeric variables
>passed to array() to character, when there is one categorical variable
>between others. I have tried I() function, but it is just functional
>in data.frame.

You can't.  An array is just a vector with a dimension attribute, and
vectors have to be all one type.  Since in general you can't coerce
text to numbers, R coerces the numbers to text.

You probably want a data.frame if you have mixed types, or if that
doesn't have enough dimensions for you, then build things out of lists
(which is how data.frames are constructed).

Duncan Murdoch