Hi Martin, Thanks for the answer! OK I can use data.matrix to convert a data frame to a numeric matrix but that's another story. Basically I'm reporting 2 problems with 'as.matrix' when applied to a data frame:
1) A documentation problem: "The method for data frames will convert any non-numeric/complex column into a character vector using 'format'" > df5 <- data.frame(toto=c("a","bb"), titi=c(9,999)) > as.matrix(df5) toto titi 1 "a" " 9" 2 "bb" "999" As I said, it seems to be the other way around: it's not the "non-numeric" column that is converted to a character vector, it's the "numeric" column. 2) the questionable decision to do this conversion using 'format' (leading to the addition of unnecessary white space) and not simply 'as.character' BTW your mailer seems to do some strange reformatting to the output of my code snippets making it hard to see the "formatting" problem that I'm trying to show. Cheers, H. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel