Hi Ravi, One thing I tend to do is, when using read.table, specify the option 'colClasses='character''. This forces everything to be read as a character. From there, as.numeric works fine, and you don't have to deal with factors and reconverting them.
Hope this helps Abhijit Ravi Varadhan wrote: > Hi, > > > > I have a data file, certain lines of which are character fields. I would > like to skip these rows, and read the data file as a numeric data frame. I > know that I can skip lines at the beginning with read.table and scan, but is > there a way to skip a specified sequence of lines (e.g., 1, 2, 10, 11, 19, > 20, 28, 29, etc.) ? > > > > If I read the entire data file, and then delete the character fields, the > values are still kept as factors, with each value denoted by its level. > Since, I have continuous variables, there are as many levels as there are > values. I am unable to coerce this to "numeric" mode. Is there a way to do > this so that I can then manipulate the numeric data frame? > > > > Thanks for any help. > > Best, > > Ravi. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > ------- > > Ravi Varadhan, Ph.D. > > Assistant Professor, The Center on Aging and Health > > Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology > > Johns Hopkins University > > Ph: (410) 502-2619 > > Fax: (410) 614-9625 > > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Webpage: http://www.jhsph.edu/agingandhealth/People/Faculty/Varadhan.html > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > -------- > > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > 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.
