[R] Comparison of numeric and character vectors

[Ista Zahn]

Ah, yes I see. Thanks John and Michael.

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 6:06 PM, R. Michael Weylandt
<michael.weylandt at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's a coercion to character implicit (i.e., the number 999 gets
> converted to the string "999") and then comparison is done in lexical
> (dictionary) order in which digits are lower than characters.
>
> You'll also note you get apparently strange behavior like "34" < "9"
> if you don't think about things in terms of dictionary orderings.
>
> Does that make sense?
>
> Michael
>
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Ista Zahn <istazahn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I just discovered that R considers characters to be really big:
>>
>>> "a" > 999
>> [1] TRUE
>>> "a" > 9e307
>> [1] TRUE
>>> "a" > 9e308
>> [1] FALSE
>>
>> and that some characters are literally infinitely big:
>>
>>> "Z" >= Inf
>> [1] TRUE
>>
>> although not all:
>>
>>> "a" > Inf
>> [1] FALSE
>>
>>
>> This came as a surprise to me (although it is quite possibly a trivial
>> issue), and I'd appreciate any information about why R considers
>> character vectors to even be comparable to numeric vectors, and why it
>> considers characters to have very large values.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Ista
>>
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