[R] Convert character string to number

[Hans-Jörg Bibiko]

On 21.06.2008, at 01:36, Ken Liu wrote:
> I would like to convert a character vector
>
> xxx <- c("1/2", "1/4")
>
> to
>
> yyy <- c(0.5, 0.25)
>
>
> , but as.numeric didn't work for me.  Could anyone give me a hint  
> please?

There are many many ways, and they're depending on the structure of  
xxx. If you only have such fractions you can use this naïve approach:

as.numeric( gsub("(\\d+)/(\\d+)", "\\1", xxx, perl=T) ) / as.numeric 
( gsub("(\\d+)/(\\d+)", "\\2", xxx, perl=T) )

--Hans