[R] Coercion of percentages by as.numeric

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 11/14/05, Brandt, T. (Tobias) <TobiasBr at taquanta.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Given that things like the following work
>
>  > a <- c("-.1"," 2.7 ","B")
> > a
> [1] "-.1"   " 2.7 " "B"
> > as.numeric(a)
> [1] -0.1  2.7   NA
> Warning message:
> NAs introduced by coercion
> >
>
> I naively expected that the following would behave differently.
>
>  > b <- c('10%', '-20%', '30.0%', '.40%')
> > b
> [1] "10%"   "-20%"  "30.0%" ".40%"
> > as.numeric(b)
> [1] NA NA NA NA
> Warning message:
> NAs introduced by coercion

Try this:

as.numeric(sub("%", "e-2", b))