[R] How to read percentage and currency data?

[Ista Zahn]

There might be a package that will do what you want, but probably the
simplest solution is to remove the unit symbols:

Dat <- read.table(textConnection("Store   Year    Revenue
abc     2010    $557889
def     2010    $697356"), header=TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
closeAllConnections()

Dat$Revenue <- as.numeric(gsub("\\$", "", Dat$Revenue))

It's easy enough to past it back in for display purposes, e.g.:

paste("$", mean(Dat$Revenue), sep="")

-Ista
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 6:15 AM, Hrishi Mittal <hrishimittal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm struggling to find any help on this seemingly simple question - how does
> one read data with percentage (%) or currency (£,$ etc.) signs? When I try
> to read a data file which has any of those symbols in the data fields, they
> are read as characters rather than values. Is there a function or library
> which can deal with such values?
>
> As an example, I use this sample from one of chinna's questions:
>
> Store   Year    Revenue
> abc     2010    $557889
> def     2010    $697356
>
> Similarly, for percentage values:
>
> Product Sale1   Sale2   Sale3   Sale4   Sale5   Sale6   Sale7
> A       101.00% 93.00%  85.00%  65.00%  74.00%  102.00% 119.00%
> B       585.00% 484.00% 599.00% 653.00% 726.00% 882.00% 1035.00%
> C       18.00%  19.00%  25.00%  15.00%  31.00%  33.00%  33.00%
> D       23.00%  22.00%  31.00%  30.00%  36.00%  42.00%  49.00%
> E       35.00%  41.00%  49.00%  40.00%  48.00%  48.00%  53.00%
> F       19.00%  20.00%  33.00%  16.00%  20.00%  26.00%  28.00%
>
>
> -----
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-- 
Ista Zahn
Graduate student
University of Rochester
Department of Clinical and Social Psychology
http://yourpsyche.org