There's a coercion to character implicit (i.e., the number 999 gets converted to the string "999") and then comparison is done in lexical (dictionary) order in which digits are lower than characters.
You'll also note you get apparently strange behavior like "34" < "9" if you don't think about things in terms of dictionary orderings. Does that make sense? Michael On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Ista Zahn <istaz...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I just discovered that R considers characters to be really big: > >> "a" > 999 > [1] TRUE >> "a" > 9e307 > [1] TRUE >> "a" > 9e308 > [1] FALSE > > and that some characters are literally infinitely big: > >> "Z" >= Inf > [1] TRUE > > although not all: > >> "a" > Inf > [1] FALSE > > > This came as a surprise to me (although it is quite possibly a trivial > issue), and I'd appreciate any information about why R considers > character vectors to even be comparable to numeric vectors, and why it > considers characters to have very large values. > > Thanks! > > Ista > > ______________________________________________ > 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.
