CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rreplacedataframe
wht_rbt_obj
wht_rbt_obj

Reputation: 103

Why does this simple way to replace an entry in a data fram in R not work?

Surely I am missing something here. I am reading this documentation:

Now, if I have any old vector:

x <- letters

I can do this:

x[5] <- "test"

... and the letter "e" in the vector x will be replaced by the string "test". So far so good, but if I make a data frame:

df <- data.frame(col1 = letters, col2 = letters)

then why do I get errors for:

 df[5,1] <- "test"

and

 df$col1[5] <- "test"

?

There MUST be an extremely simple way to do this, to get in to a data frame and change just one single value.

The error is "invalid factor level." So I suppose that ideally the way would be to somehow tell R that I want it to NOT treat the relevant column in the DF as a factor variable.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 92

Answers (1)

Matthew Lundberg
Matthew Lundberg

Reputation: 42649

Use the stringsAsFactors argument to data.frame:

df <- data.frame(col1 = letters, col2 = letters, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

This will give columns of mode character, as you want.

?data.frame shows its options.

Upvotes: 6

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