On Aug 23, 2009, at 2:47 AM, Alexander Shenkin wrote:

On 8/21/2009 3:04 PM, David Winsemius wrote:

On Aug 21, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Alexander Shenkin wrote:

Thanks everyone for their replies, both on- and off-list.  I should
clarify, since I left out some important information.  My original
dataframe has some numeric columns, which get changed to character by
gsub when I replace spaces with NAs.

If you used is.na() <- that would not happen to a true _numeric_ vector (but, of course, a numeric vector in a data.frame could not have spaces,
so you are probably not using precise terminology).

I do have true numeric columns, but I loop through my entire dataframe
looking for blanks and spaces for convenience.

I still have problems with this statement. As I understand R, this should be impossible. I have looked at both you postings and neither of them clarify the issues. How can you have blanks or spaces in an R numeric vector?



You would be well
advised to include the actual code rather than applying loose
terminology subject you your and our misinterpretation.

I did include code in my previous email.  Perhaps you were looking for
different parts.


?is.na


I am guessing that you were using read.table() on the original data, in
which case you should look at the colClasses parameter.


yep - I use read.csv, and I do use colClasses.  But as I mentioned
earlier, gsub converts those columns to characters. Thanks for the tip
about is.na() <-.  I'm now using the following, thus side-stepping the
whole "controlling as.data.frame's column conversion" issue:

final_dataf = lapply(final_dataf, function(x){ is.na(x) <-
+ grep('^\\s*$',x); return(x) })


Good that you have a solution.

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT

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