Hello all. I am an experienced R user, I have used R for many years for a wide variety of applications. However, I keep on running into one obstacle: I never want factors or levels in my data frames, but I keep on getting them. Is there any way to globally turn this whole feature of data frames off? Using options(stringAsFactors=FALSE) does not seem to work. Alternatively, if I have a data frame with levels, can I just get rid of them in that data frame?
Here is an example: I have a large text file, of which part is in the fixed-width tabular form I need. I created a widths vector and a column names vector. I then read the file as follows: raw1<-read.fwf(fn1,widths=widmax,col.names=headermax,stringsAsFactors=FALSE) But raw1 still has factors! It is an old class data frame: > is(raw1) [1] "data.frame" "oldClass" And it still has levels: > raw1[1,1] [1] Gustav wind 229 Levels: - - - - - - - - - - - WIN - - - M ... Z INDICATES C My question is: 1. Can I get rid of the levels in raw1? 2. Even better -- can I stop it getting read in as a data frame with factors? 3. Even better -- can I just tell R to never use factors in my data frames? Or any other solution that occurs to people -- maybe this is the wrong way to go about reading in fixed width data in this kind of file. I would appreciate any help. Asher ______________________________________________ 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.
