[R] How to avoid automatic coercion to factor?

[Dutky, Steve]

I have a function that manipulates a list of numeric and character
components of equal length and wants to return a data.frame.

EG, 

f<-function() { 
	a<-list(Int1=1:5,Char1=letters[1:5],Char2=letters[6:10])
	b<-data.frame(a)
}

How can I get the columns Char1, Char2, (...CharN) returned coerced to
character and not factor?

It appears that I could coerce individual columns by
b$CharI<-as.character(b$CharI). Is there a less ugly way of doing this?

Thanks, Steve Dutky
301-545-4113 desk
301-325-8146 cell
steve.dutky at thomson.com
www.thomson.com/financial