Numeric data not numeric in .csv file
On 05/02/2012 10:47 AM, Eve Proper wrote:
I am a raw novice to R, playing around with a mini .csv dataset created in
Excel. I can read it in and the data looks OK in Excel and upon initial
inspection in R:
hikes<- read.csv("/Users/eproper/Desktop/hikes.csv", header=TRUE)
print(hikes)
does exactly what it is supposed to do.
Two of the variables are genuine strings, but the others ought to be
numeric, and R will calculate their min, max etc. However, is.numeric
returns FALSE for all of them; storage.mode returns "language." as.numeric
returns "Error: 'pairlist' object cannot be coerced to type 'double'." In
what I suspect is a related problem, any command that calls for a variable
name requires an initial ~ to work. That is, instead of plot(miles) I have
to use plot(~miles).
No doubt there is some very elementary mistake I am making, but I can't
figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.
Hi Eve, Have you tried "as.numeric" on them? As Jeff suggested, you may be importing spaces along with the digits or some other character that changes the class of the variable. Also note that the default behavior of functions like read.csv is to coerce all of the values in a column of the resulting data frame to the "lowest common denominator". If you have one text value in a column of numbers, you usually get factor values. This is due to the restriction that all values in a column must be of the same class (data type). Jim