converting character matrix to a dataframe
It is a bit more efficient to use as.data.frame in your apply. You could make a copy of as.data.frame.matrix (under another name) and remove the special-casing of character matrices. This would efficiently give you a data frame with character columns, but they would then not be treated 'AsIs' in subsequent manipulations. So this is only desirable if efficiency is really important (and it seems unlikely to me that it is).
On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, John M. Miyamoto wrote:
Dear R-Help,
Suppose I have a character matrix, e.g.,
(ch.mat <- matrix(c('a','s','*','f','w','*','k','*','*','f','i','o'),
ncol=3))
When I convert 'ch.mat' to a dataframe, the columns are converted to
factors:
(d1 <- data.frame(ch.mat))
mode(d1[,1])
is.factor(d1[,1])
To prevent this, I can use 'I' to protect the column vectors:
(d2 <- data.frame(x1 = I(ch.mat[,1]), x2 = I(ch.mat[,2]), x3 =
I(ch.mat[,3])))
mode(d2[,1])
is.factor(d2[,2])
but this method is cumbersome if the matrix has many columns.
The following code is reasonably efficient even if the matrix has
arbitrarily many columns.
(d3 <- data.frame(apply(ch.mat,2,function(x) data.frame(I(x)))))
mode(d3[,1])
is.factor(d3[,1])
Question: Is there a more efficient method than the last one for
converting a character matrix to a dataframe while preventing the
automatic conversion of the column vectors to factors?
John
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John Miyamoto, Dept. of Psychology, Box 351525
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