On 06/04/2010 3:40 PM, cavalier33901 wrote:
I have uploaded the property data from Lee County Property Appraiser into R,
but my problem is that I am unable manipulate and use many of the columns
because they are classified as factors. I think this is because the values
represent selling prices and therefore have $ in front of them. I tried
using as.integer but this funtion converts the values into a totaly useless
form. Is there a way to convert these columns from factors into something
usefull for plotting and graphing such as integer form? Thanks
Use stringsAsFactors=FALSE when you read the data, and they'll be left
as strings, not factors. Then convert them by stripping off the
non-numeric bits and using as.numeric.
For example:
> price <- " $123,456"
> price <- gsub(",", "", price) # remove comma
> price <- gsub("^[[:blank:]]*", "", price) # remove leading whitespace
> price <- gsub("\\$", "", price) # remove dollar sign
>
> price
[1] 123456
Duncan Murdoch
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