This is one of R's rather _endearing_ little idiosyncrasies. I ran into it a while ago. http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/98090.html
For some reason, possibly historical, the option "stringAsFactors" is set to TRUE. As Prof Ripley says FAQ 7.10 will tell you as.numeric(as.character(f)) # for a one-off conversion >From Gabor Grothendieck A one-off solution for a complete data.frame DF <- data.frame(let = letters[1:3], num = 1:3, stringsAsFactors = FALSE) str(DF) # to see what has happened. You can reset the option globally, see below. However you might want to read Gabor Grothendieck's comment about this in the thread referenced above since it could cause problems if you transfer files alot. Personally I went with the global option since I don't tend to transfer programs to other people and I was getting tired of tracking down errors in my programs caused by numeric and character variables suddenly deciding to become factors. >From Steven Tucker: You can also this option globally with options(stringsAsFactors = TRUE) # in \library\base\R\Rprofile --- Falk Lieder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have imported a data file to R. Unfortunately R > has interpreted some > numeric variables as factors. Therefore I want to > reconvert these to numeric > vectors whose values are the factor levels' labels. > I tried > as.numeric(<factor>), > but it returns a vector of factor levels (i.e. > 1,2,3,...) instead of labels > (i.e. 0.71, 1.34, 2.61, ). > What can I do instead? > > Best wishes, Falk ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
