[R] Converting charter string to vector of numbers

[David Winsemius]

On Mar 25, 2015, at 10:27 AM, Turgidson wrote:

> Apologies for bringing up an old topic, but I am not finding working answers. 
> I am also an R newbie, so I'm still on the steep part of the learning curve.
> 
> I have a character string :  "0.5 1 2 3 4"
> 
> I need to convert it to a vector of numbers.

The releatively recent additon of teh text parameter to scan lets you do this:

scan(text="0.5 1 2 3 4" )

#Read 5 items
#[1] 0.5 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0

And the values are of course assign()-able:

 num <- scan(text="0.5 1 2 3 4")
#Read 5 items
 num
#[1] 0.5 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0

In the old days one needed to use textConnection() and one still needs to do so for readLines which does not use scan().


>  I get as far as strsplit(),
> which gives me 
> 
> "0.5" "1" "2" "3" "4"
> 
> this is still treated by R as a single item.  I need to get it to look like
> this:  "0.5", "1", "2", "3", "4"
> 
> so that I can use as.numeric() and make it into a vector of numbers...   I
> have been going mad because for text operations, commas and quotes are
> loaded with meaning, and I keep going around in circles.
> 
> Any help would be appreciated
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Converting-charter-string-to-vector-of-numbers-tp4705097.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA