Thanks everyone for your helpful responses. I looked at the csv file in a
text editor and saw no spaces or non-numerical characters (other than
periods as decimals) outside of the header. str() says me that the
variables are either num or int.

David was spot-on; I was trying
> storage.mode(~miles)
[1] "language"

instead of

> storage.mode(hikes$miles)
[1] "double"

The fault was in my grasp of R's syntax, not the data.

Thanks!

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:09 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius@comcast.net>wrote:

>
> On May 1, 2012, at 8:47 PM, Eve Proper wrote:
>
>  I am a raw novice to R, playing around with a mini .csv dataset created in
>> Excel. I can read it in and the data looks OK in Excel and upon initial
>> inspection in R:
>>
>> hikes <- read.csv("/Users/eproper/**Desktop/hikes.csv", header=TRUE)
>> print(hikes)
>>
>> does exactly what it is supposed to do.
>>
>> Two of the variables are genuine strings, but the others ought to be
>> numeric, and R will calculate their min, max etc. However, is.numeric
>> returns FALSE for all of them;
>>
>
> How did you do this? What code did you use? It should have been:
>
> lapply(hikes, is.numeric)
>
>  storage.mode returns "language."
>>
>
> Well, that suggests that you were trying to use unquoted variable names
> without the data objects name. Did you use attach() on the basis of some
> misguided instructions?
>
>
>
>  as.numeric
>> returns "Error: 'pairlist' object cannot be coerced to type 'double'." In
>> what I suspect is a related problem, any command that calls for a variable
>> name requires an initial ~ to work. That is, instead of plot(miles) I have
>> to use plot(~miles).
>>
>
> As I said, you are not correctly referencing column names within data
> objects.
>
>
>> No doubt there is some very elementary mistake I am making, but I can't
>> figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.
>>
>> <http://theturducken.blogspot.**com/ <http://theturducken.blogspot.com/>>
>>
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>
> And you should read the Posting Guide and correct your posting format.
>
>
>
>> ______________________________**________________
>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/**listinfo/r-help<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help>
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/**
>> posting-guide.html <http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html>
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> David Winsemius, MD
> Heritage Laboratories
> West Hartford, CT
>
>

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