Hi everyone, please put me off that list!!! The unsubscribe function does not 
function...
THANKS!!!
BW Sonja

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Im 
Auftrag von David Romano
Gesendet: 15 November 2012 12:19
An: [email protected]
Betreff: [R] using ifelse to remove NA's from specific columns of a data frame 
containing strings and numbers

Hi everyone,

I have a data frame one of whose columns is a character vector and the rest are 
numeric, and in debugging a script, I noticed that an ifelse call seems to be 
coercing the character column to a numeric column, and producing
unintended values as a result.   Roughly, here's what I tried to do:

df: a data frame with, say, the first column as a character column and the 
second and third columns numeric.

also: NA's occur only in the numeric columns, and if they occur in one, they 
occur in the other as well.

I wanted to replace the NA's in column 2 with 0's and the ones in column 3 with 
1's, so first I did this:

> na.replacements <-ifelse(col(df)==2,0,1).

Then I used a second ifelse call to try to remove the NA's as I wanted, first 
by doing this:

> clean.df <- ifelse(is.na(df), na.replacements, df),

which produced a list of lists vaguely resembling df, with the NA's mostly 
intact, and so then I tried this:

> clean.df <- ifelse(is.na(df), na.replacements, unlist(df)),

which seems to work if all the columns are numeric, but otherwise changes 
strings to numbers.

I can't make sense of the help documentation enough to clear this up, but my 
guess is that the "yes" and "no" values passed to ifelse need to be vectors, in 
which case it seems I'll have to use another approach entirely, but even if is 
not the case and lists are acceptable, I'm not sure how to convert a mixed-mode 
data frame into a vector-like list of elements (which I would hope would work).

I'd be grateful for any suggestions!

Thanks,
David Romano

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