[R] Check if a character vector can be coerced to numeric?

[Jeff Newmiller]

Using capital letters does not improve clarity... it just offends people.

Does read.table and friends not do this to your satisfaction already with as.is=TRUE? If not, shouldn't coercing it and checking for NA serve?

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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

Jonathan Greenberg <jgrn at illinois.edu> wrote:

>Given an arbitrary set of character vectors:
>
>myvect1 <- c("abc","3","4")
>myvect2 <- c("2","3","4")
>
>I would like to develop a function that will convert any vectors that
>can
>be PROPERLY converted to a numeric (myvect2) into a numeric, but leaves
>character vectors which cannot be converted (myvect1) alone.  Is there
>any
>simple way to do this (e.g. some function that tests if a vector is
>coercible to a numeric before doing so)?
>
>--j