How to convert Charagter variables into numeric

On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 22:50:38, <arup.pramanik27 at gmail.com> wrote:

  

I am importing a dataset in R where some of the variable are numerical
    

and
  

some of them are character...but the problem is that R is treating
numerical variables as character (I am using "is.character" to judge the
type). Now the question is how can I convert these character variables
    

into
  

numeric and also let me know about the other conversion like "numeric to
categorical","numeric to continuous" etc.Thank you.

Arup