Converting a dataframe to a character vector

Try this:

Lines <- "Repens

+  Laurifolia
+      Repens
+  Laurifolia
+  Laurifolia
+ "

# replace next line with v <- scan("myfile.dat", what = "")
v <- scan(textConnection(Lines), what = "")

Read 5 items

is.vector(v)

[1] TRUE

class(v)

[1] "character"

str(v)

chr [1:5] "Repens" "Laurifolia" "Repens" "Laurifolia" ...


On 7/16/07, Taylor, RB <rbt501 at york.ac.uk> wrote:

Hello all,

This isn't quite a spatially related question but perhaps someone can
help me with this problem?

I have some species name recorded in a tab delim text file. They are all
just one word long as seen below. I want to put them into a vector for
use in Spatstat, which as far as I can see means reading the data into a
data frame and then converting it to a character vector.

So first I read the file into R.

 > df <- read.table("C:\\temp\\test.txt")
 > df

          V1
1     Repens
2 Laurifolia
3     Repens
4 Laurifolia
5 Laurifolia

# just to check it's a data frame

 > is.data.frame(df)

[1] TRUE

#so far so good, now to try to convert to a vector, preserving the
#species names...

 > v <- as.vector(df)
 > is.vector(v)

[1] FALSE

Why will it not convert it to a character vector automatically? Ok after
consulting the help file I use the "mode" feature to attempt to force it
to convert to a character string.

 > v <- as.vector(df, mode = "character")
 > is.vector(v)

[1] TRUE

ok some progress .... but then

 > v

[1] "c(2, 1, 2, 1, 1)"

ok I'm confused at this point. What is it actually telling me? That I
have a vector with the text string "c(2, 1, 2, 1, 1)" in it?

OK, so to be clear I want a vector that looks like this:
[1] "Repens" "Laurifolia" "Repens" "Laurifolia" "Laurifolia"


Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Rob

-- 
Rob Taylor

University of York
Biology Department
PO Box 373
York
YO10 5YW
United Kingdom

Work +44 (0)1904 32 8557
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