Use the stringsAsFactors = FALSE argument for read.table() so the strings will remain factors and then you can convert them directly yourself.
Michael On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Martin Batholdy <batho...@googlemail.com> wrote: > 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. > ______________________________________________ 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.