[R] why is this a factor?

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Ista Zahn <istazahn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Or go all the way and put
>
> options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
>
> at the top your script or in your .Rprofile. This will prevent this
> kind of annoyance in the future without having to say stringsAsFactors
> = FALSE all the time.

I go back and forth about doing this too (setting a global hammer to
stringsAsFactors), but then other things might mess up -- imagine a
scenario where a package is written with the assumption that the
default `stringsAsFactors=TRUE` setting hasn't been changed, which
could then break when you go the nuclear-global-override route.

-steve

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Computational Biologist
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Genentech