[R] control the conversion of factor to numeric

[R. Michael Weylandt]

Add levels= to your factor() call.

E.g.,

x1 <- factor(rep(1:4, 5), labels=c("slightly disagree", "disagree",
"agree", "slightly agree"), levels = c(2,1,4,3))
as.numeric(x1)
 [1] 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3

Michael

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Martin Batholdy
<batholdy at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Dear R-list,
>
>
>
> I currently have to convert a data.frame with several factor-variables to a numeric matrix.
>
> Now the problem is, that the order of the factor-labels don't match the order I would like to use.
>
>
> for example, let's assume I have this factor-variable in my data-frame:
>
> x <- factor(rep(1:4, 5), labels=c("slightly disagree", "disagree", "agree", "slightly agree"))
>
>
> Now I would like to convert this to a numeric vector so that disagree == 1, slightly disagree == 2, slightly agree == 3, and agree gets the value 4.
> but as.numeric(x) just converts the factor levels to numerical values according to their label-order.
>
>
> Is there a convenient, flexible function that let's you control how the factor-levels get converted to numerical values?
>
>
>
> thanks for any suggestions!
>
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