Conversion to factor may happen (and often does) when you read in data with
read.table(). So one solution may be reading in the same data again in a
slightly different way:

read.table(file="mydatafile", as.is=TRUE)
# see also ?read.table

You can also specify a class to each column of the data you're about to read
in:
read.table(****,  colClasses=c("numeric", "factor", "character",
"my.funny.class"))


Ad take a look at   http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html    p. 7.10
for the right answer -- in any case, don't use as.numeric(x)!

Kenn


On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 9:24 AM, Qman Fin <finosaur@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have some data x, which are actualy consisted of numerical enties. But
> the
> class of this matrix is set to be "factor" by someone else. I used
> "class(x)", it turns out to be "factor". So I can not calculate them.
>
> How can I turn them into numerical data so that I can apply math operations
> on them? Thanks a lot for your help.
>
> Selina
>
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>
> ______________________________________________
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> 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.
>

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