Ok, I think that would work – thanks! However, in my case I read a data.frame via read.table(). So some of the columns get transformed to factors automatically – I don't generate the factor-variables as in the example, so I can't control how the levels are ordered (or can I?).
On 18.10.2011, at 15:35, R. Michael Weylandt wrote: > Add levels= to your factor() call. > > E.g., > > x1 <- factor(rep(1:4, 5), labels=c("slightly disagree", "disagree", > "agree", "slightly agree"), levels = c(2,1,4,3)) > as.numeric(x1) > [1] 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 2 1 4 3 > > Michael > > On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Martin Batholdy > <batho...@googlemail.com> wrote: >> Dear R-list, >> >> >> >> I currently have to convert a data.frame with several factor-variables to a >> numeric matrix. >> >> Now the problem is, that the order of the factor-labels don't match the >> order I would like to use. >> >> >> for example, let's assume I have this factor-variable in my data-frame: >> >> x <- factor(rep(1:4, 5), labels=c("slightly disagree", "disagree", "agree", >> "slightly agree")) >> >> >> Now I would like to convert this to a numeric vector so that disagree == 1, >> slightly disagree == 2, slightly agree == 3, and agree gets the value 4. >> but as.numeric(x) just converts the factor levels to numerical values >> according to their label-order. >> >> >> Is there a convenient, flexible function that let's you control how the >> factor-levels get converted to numerical values? >> >> >> >> thanks for any suggestions! >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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.