FacsToChars: Convert all 'factor' columns to 'character' columns in a...

In mrdwab/AMsnippets: Useful function "snippets"

Description

Sometimes, we forget to use the stringsAsFactors argument when using read.table and related functions. By default, R converts character columns to factors. Instead of re-reading the data, the FacsToChars function will identify which columns are currently factors, and convert them all to characters.

Usage

  FacsToChars(mydf, overwrite = FALSE)

Arguments

mydf	The name of your data.frame
overwrite	Logical. Should the current object be overwritten? Defaults to FALSE

Author(s)

Ananda Mahto

See Also

read.table

Examples

## Some example data
dat <- data.frame(title = c("title1", "title2", "title3"),
              author = c("author1", "author2", "author3"),
              customerID = c(1, 2, 1))
## Make a copy of dat for later
dat_copy <- dat
str(dat) # current structure
dat2 <- FacsToChars(dat)
str(dat2) # Your new object
str(dat)  # Original object is unaffected

## You can also overwrite the existing object
str(dat_copy) # Before applying the function
FacsToChars(dat_copy, overwrite=TRUE)
str(dat_copy) # After applying the function

mrdwab/AMsnippets documentation built on May 23, 2019, 7:15 a.m.