Ah, yes I see. Thanks John and Michael. On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 6:06 PM, R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weyla...@gmail.com> wrote: > There's a coercion to character implicit (i.e., the number 999 gets > converted to the string "999") and then comparison is done in lexical > (dictionary) order in which digits are lower than characters. > > You'll also note you get apparently strange behavior like "34" < "9" > if you don't think about things in terms of dictionary orderings. > > Does that make sense? > > Michael > > On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Ista Zahn <istaz...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I just discovered that R considers characters to be really big: >> >>> "a" > 999 >> [1] TRUE >>> "a" > 9e307 >> [1] TRUE >>> "a" > 9e308 >> [1] FALSE >> >> and that some characters are literally infinitely big: >> >>> "Z" >= Inf >> [1] TRUE >> >> although not all: >> >>> "a" > Inf >> [1] FALSE >> >> >> This came as a surprise to me (although it is quite possibly a trivial >> issue), and I'd appreciate any information about why R considers >> character vectors to even be comparable to numeric vectors, and why it >> considers characters to have very large values. >> >> Thanks! >> >> Ista >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list >> 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.
______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.