[R] Why Does R Print out strange record?

[Richard M. Heiberger]

You have read your Date variable in as a character variable, which was
coerced to a factor.
You probably wanted the values to be interpreted as dates.  example of
what to do is below.
Note that the date-factor levels are sorted alphabetically, which is
almost certainly not what you want.

In addition, please do not use HTML mail.  R-help is plain-text list
and R code often gets scrambled beyond recognition.

Attaching a data.frame is very bad style, and will get you into
trouble in the future.  Again, see below for a recommendation.



rates <- read.csv(text="
    Date, Int
Feb-2012, .04
Mar-2012, .045
Apr-2012, .042
May-2012, .038
Jun-2012, .051
",
header=TRUE,
colClasses=c("character","numeric"))

rates
sapply(rates, class)


## dates are one of the most difficult computing concepts to get
## right.  your dates are month and year, not including day-of-month,
## and are therefore even more difficult.  I am putting them all on
## the first of the month, and forcing a common time zone to bypass
## the daylight savings time problems.

rates$Date <- strptime(paste0("1-", rates$Date), format="%d-%b-%Y", tz="UTC")
## you will need to read
## ?as.POSIXct
## ?strptime

## the rest of your calculations can be done more easily with
vectorized arithmetic.

mysize <- nrow(rates)
rates$thisone <- c(diff(rates$Int), NA)
rates$nextone <- c(diff(rates$Int, lag=2), NA, NA)
rates$lastone <- (rates$thisone + rates$nextone)/6.5*1000
rates

On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 8:08 PM, arthur brogard via R-help
<r-help at r-project.org> wrote:
> I have this bit of code:
> rates=read.csv("Rates2.csv")
> attach(rates)
> mysize <- nrow(rates)
> count <- 0
> for(i in 1:(mysize - 3)) {
> #print(i)
> thisday <- Date[i]
> thisone <- Int[i+1] - Int[i]
> nextone <- Int[i+2] - Int[i]
> lastone <- thisone + nextone
> lastone <- lastone/6.5
> lastone <- lastone * 1000
>
> #print("thisone")
> #print(thisone)
> #print("nextone")
> #print(nextone)
>
> if (lastone >0){
> print(thisday)
> print("dollars saved per $100,000")
> print(lastone)
> count = count + 1
> }
> }
> which generally works alright until I put the last bit in about 'thisday'
> since then I get a display with such as this in it:
> [1] "dollars saved per $100,000"
> [1] 9.230769
> [1] Feb-2012
> 689 Levels: Apr-1959 Apr-1960 Apr-1961 Apr-1962 ... Sep-2015
> [1] "dollars saved per $100,000"
> [1] 18.46154
> [1] Jun-2015
> 689 Levels: Apr-1959 Apr-1960 Apr-1961 Apr-1962 ... Sep-2015
> [1] "dollars saved per $100,000"
> [1] 21.53846
>
> This word 'Levels'  is not present in the data.
>
> Can anyone help, tell me what is happening here?
>
>
>  ================================
>
> Can you handle truth ?
>
> Barbara Walker: Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
>
> What it is really about:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYKAgAfYJZE
>
> The bald truth:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kevNDOCbKxE
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbfdsMdbcfA
>
> Sanity:
> Those terrible Russians:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZsjoiFfpXM
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.