Data Type Conversion

Type conversions in R work as you would expect. For example, adding a character string to a numeric vector converts all the elements in the vector to character.

Use is. foo to test for data type foo. Returns TRUE or FALSE
Use as. foo to explicitly convert it.

is.numeric(), is.character(), is.vector(), is.matrix(), is.data.frame()
as.numeric(), as.character(), as.vector(), as.matrix(), as.data.frame)

Examples


	to one long vector	to matrix	to data frame
from vector	c(x,y)	cbind(x,y)	data.frame(x,y)
from vector	c(x,y)	bind(x,y)	data.frame(x,y)
from matrix	as.vector(mymatrix)		as.data.frame(mymatrix)
from data frame		as.matrix(myframe)

Dates

You can convert dates to and from character or numeric data. See date valuesfor more information.

To Practice

To explore data types in R, try this free interactive introduction to R course.