How do you convert a char data frame to numeric?

Question

In order to continue with my preparation of the dataset, I need to make it so the str of each col is numeric instead of chars.

str(eighthr)
'data.frame':   2533 obs. of  74 variables:
 $ Date  : chr  "1/2/1998" "1/3/1998" "1/4/1998" "1/5/1998" ...
 $ WSR0  : chr  "2.8" "2.9" "4.7" "2.6" ...
 $ WSR1  : chr  "3.2" "2.8" "3.8" "2.1" ...
 $ WSR2  : chr  "3.3" "2.6" "3.7" "1.6" ...
 $ WSR3  : chr  "2.7" "2.1" "3.8" "1.4" ...
 $ WSR4  : chr  "3.3" "2.2" "2.9" "0.9" ...
 $ WSR5  : chr  "3.2" "2.5" "3.1" "1.5" ...

How do I convert all rows except $Date?

Try with eighthr <- type.convert(eighthr, as.is = TRUE) Did you meant numeric or` integer — akrun
– akrun, Commented Jun 9, 2021 at 21:28
ok. Please check if that works for you. If there are any non-numeric characters in the columns, it may not work though — akrun
– akrun, Commented Jun 9, 2021 at 21:30

henryn · Accepted Answer · 2021-06-09 21:31:18Z

2

You can use across in a mutate from dplyr:

library(dplyr)
mutate(eighthr, across(-Date, as.numeric))

answered Jun 9, 2021 at 21:31

henryn

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3 Comments

Lolstroop Over a year ago

It actually didnt work, when I str() it still says char

henryn Over a year ago

Did you assign the result? eighthr <- mutate(eighthr, across(-Date, as.numeric))

Lolstroop Over a year ago

I did, its weird, it runs but when I str(eighthr) comes with char

Papuha · Accepted Answer · 2021-06-10 01:04:14Z

1

I tried henryn solution and it works. You can try copying this code and see if you get errors.

library(dplyr)

data <- data.frame(
  Date = as.character(c('1/2/1998', '1/3/1998')),
  WSR0 = c('2.5', '2.6'),
  WSR1 = c('3.2', '3.5')
)

data2 <- mutate(data, across(-Date, as.numeric))
str(data2)

For whatever reason if the mutate way still doesn't work, you can do a tedious way but surely works which is simply use as.numeric. This should work for sure as it only uses base R command and we can rule out any library issue.

eighthr$WSR0 <- as.numeric(eighthr$WSR0)
eighthr$WSR1 <- as.numeric(eighthr$WSR1)

answered Jun 10, 2021 at 1:04

Papuha

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