[R] converting factor to numeric gives "NAs introduced by coercion"

[Dennis Murphy]

Hi:

The argument stringsAsFactors = FALSE will suppress character data
from being converted to factors. For more control, see the arguments
colClasses and as.is in ?read.table - they should carry over to
read.delim[2] but don't quote me on that :)

HTH,
Dennis

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:45 AM, anglor <angelica.ekenstam at dpes.gu.se> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a dataframe that I imported from a .txt file by:
>
> skogTemp <- read.delim2("Skogaryd_shoot_data.txt", header=TRUE, fill=TRUE)
>
> and the data are factors, how can avoid factors from the beginning? Although
> the file contains both characters and numbers.
>
> I tried to convert some of the columns from factor to numeric and as I
> understood it you can not use only as.numeric but as.character first. I got
> this warning message:
>
>> skogTemp_1 <- as.numeric(as.character(skogTemp_1[,2:4]))
> Warning message:
> NAs introduced by coercion
>
> I have lots of NAs in my data. Tries to check what class I had now but
> another warning is given me:
>> class(skogTemp_1[,2])
> Error in skogTemp_1[, 2] : incorrect number of dimensions
>> class(skogTemp_1[1,2])
> Error in skogTemp_1[1, 2] : incorrect number of dimensions
>
> frustrating... I don't know what this mean.
>
> Can anyone help?
>
> Thank you,
> Angelica
>
>
>
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