Petr and Rob, I apologise for complicating my question further. Having more
than one currency in the same column is no doubt inconsistent. For now, I'm
happy to have a solution for reading single currencies or percentage values
in separate columns. I will use string replacement until I can think of a
better way.



On 24 February 2010 16:48, Rob Forler <rforler@uchicago.edu> wrote:

> This seems like a case where you should have a column that is "Currency" or
> "CurrencyKey".
>
> You can then do proper sql like queries on the data and convert into a base
> currency or something to do column wise operations.
>
> A column of data should be somehow "consistent" within some view. Currently
> your column of different currencies is consistent in no view.
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Petr PIKAL <petr.pikal@precheza.cz>wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> r-help-bounces@r-project.org napsal dne 24.02.2010 16:55:49:
>>
>> >
>> > Petr,
>> >
>> > Removing the % signs by Ista's method works. However as I noted earlier,
>> I
>> > was hoping there was a more elegant solution which deals with percentage
>> and
>> > currency values without knowing about their presence beforehand.
>> >
>> > It's a shame that something which Excel deals with trivially is such a
>> hack
>> > in R. I'll try to delve deeper and write something which does this well.
>> But
>> > my knowledge is limited and I will probably come back for help.
>>
>> I believe that if you introduce a new class which could specify currencies
>> you could write methods for handling them. But it is beyond my knowledge
>> and somebody else has to answer it.
>>
>> One question immediately rise how would you handle different currencies in
>> one column (I believe that even Excel could have troubles with different
>> currencies in one document).
>>
>> Regards
>> Petr
>>
>>
>> >
>> > For now, Henrique Dallazuanna provided me with the following solution
>> using
>> > the gsubfn package. Now if only I can get it to install....
>> >
>> > Lines <- "Store   Year    Revenue
>> > abc     2010    R$557889
>> > def     2010    $D697356
>> > ghi       2010    Ł321
>> > jkl     2010    €21648"
>> >
>> > d <- read.table(textConnection(Lines), header = TRUE)
>> > closeAllConnections()
>> >
>> > colCurrency <- 'Revenue'
>> > library(gsubfn)
>> > newD <- transform(d,
>> >                  Revenue = strapply(as.character(d[,colCurrency]),
>> >                                     pattern = "(\\w+\\W|\\W)|(\\d+)",
>> >                                         backref = 1, simplify = rbind))
>> > newD
>> >
>> > -----
>> > Try  http://prettygraph.com Pretty Graph , the easiest way to make
>> R-powered
>> > graphs on the web.
>> > --
>> > View this message in context:
>> http://n4.nabble.com/How-to-read-percentage-and-
>> > currency-data-tp1567318p1567643.html
>> > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>> >
>> > ______________________________________________
>> > R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>> > 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.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>> 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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