[R-sig-Geo] Converting a dataframe to a character vector

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Try this:

> Lines <- "Repens
+  Laurifolia
+      Repens
+  Laurifolia
+  Laurifolia
+ "
> # replace next line with v <- scan("myfile.dat", what = "")
> v <- scan(textConnection(Lines), what = "")
Read 5 items
> is.vector(v)
[1] TRUE
> class(v)
[1] "character"
> str(v)
 chr [1:5] "Repens" "Laurifolia" "Repens" "Laurifolia" ...


On 7/16/07, Taylor, RB <rbt501 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> This isn't quite a spatially related question but perhaps someone can
> help me with this problem?
>
> I have some species name recorded in a tab delim text file. They are all
> just one word long as seen below. I want to put them into a vector for
> use in Spatstat, which as far as I can see means reading the data into a
> data frame and then converting it to a character vector.
>
> So first I read the file into R.
>
>  > df <- read.table("C:\\temp\\test.txt")
>  > df
>           V1
> 1     Repens
> 2 Laurifolia
> 3     Repens
> 4 Laurifolia
> 5 Laurifolia
>
> # just to check it's a data frame
>  > is.data.frame(df)
> [1] TRUE
>
> #so far so good, now to try to convert to a vector, preserving the
> #species names...
>  > v <- as.vector(df)
>  > is.vector(v)
> [1] FALSE
>
> Why will it not convert it to a character vector automatically? Ok after
> consulting the help file I use the "mode" feature to attempt to force it
> to convert to a character string.
>
>  > v <- as.vector(df, mode = "character")
>  > is.vector(v)
> [1] TRUE
>
> ok some progress .... but then
>
>  > v
> [1] "c(2, 1, 2, 1, 1)"
>
> ok I'm confused at this point. What is it actually telling me? That I
> have a vector with the text string "c(2, 1, 2, 1, 1)" in it?
>
> OK, so to be clear I want a vector that looks like this:
> [1] "Repens" "Laurifolia" "Repens" "Laurifolia" "Laurifolia"
>
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Rob
>
> --
> Rob Taylor
>
> University of York
> Biology Department
> PO Box 373
> York
> YO10 5YW
> United Kingdom
>
> Work +44 (0)1904 32 8557
> Mob  +44 (0)777 258 5390
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-sig-Geo mailing list
> R-sig-Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
>