R convert all rows to strings

Question

I need to convert all rows of a dataframe to strings.

Here's a sample data:

1.12331,4.331123,4.12335435,1,"asd"
1.123453345,5.654456,4.889999,1.45456,"qwe"
2.00098,5.5445,4.768799,1.999999,"ttre"

I read this data into R, got a dataframe.

td<-read.table("test.csv", sep=',')

When I run apply(td, 2, as.character) on this data, I got

    V1       V2       V3       V4       V5    
[1,] "1.1233" "4.3311" "4.1234" "1.0000" "asd" 
[2,] "1.1235" "5.6545" "4.8900" "1.4546" "qwe" 
[3,] "2.0010" "5.5445" "4.7688" "2.0000" "ttre"

But when I do the same only on numeric columns, I got the different result:

apply(td[,1:4], 2, as.character)

     V1            V2         V3           V4        
[1,] "1.12331"     "4.331123" "4.12335435" "1"       
[2,] "1.123453345" "5.654456" "4.889999"   "1.45456" 
[3,] "2.00098"     "5.5445"   "4.768799"   "1.999999"

As a result I need a dataframe with values exactly the same as in source file. What I'm doing wrong?

As the other answers suggest, reading in your data in the correct format to begin with is the recommended way to deal with this, but for what it's worth, data.frame(lapply(td, as.character), stringsAsFactors=FALSE) should also work. — A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1
– A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1, Commented Feb 12, 2013 at 11:40

csgillespie · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-12 11:43:52Z

4

You can set colClasses in read.table() to make all columns as character.

 td <- read.table("test.csv", sep=',',colClasses="character")
 td
           V1       V2         V3       V4   V5
1     1.12331 4.331123 4.12335435        1  asd
2 1.123453345 5.654456   4.889999  1.45456  qwe
3     2.00098   5.5445   4.768799 1.999999 ttre

 str(td)
'data.frame':   3 obs. of  5 variables:
 $ V1: chr  "1.12331" "1.123453345" "2.00098"
 $ V2: chr  "4.331123" "5.654456" "5.5445"
 $ V3: chr  "4.12335435" "4.889999" "4.768799"
 $ V4: chr  "1" "1.45456" "1.999999"
 $ V5: chr  "asd" "qwe" "ttre"

edited Feb 12, 2013 at 11:43

csgillespie

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answered Feb 12, 2013 at 11:11

Didzis Elferts

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Comments

James · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-12 11:11:26Z

2

The best way to do this is the read the data in as character in the first place. You can do this with the colClasses argument to read.table:

td <- read.table("test.csv", sep=',', colClasses="character")

answered Feb 12, 2013 at 11:11

James

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