CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdataframe
Bridgeport Tucker Jr
Bridgeport Tucker Jr

Reputation: 69

a column in R dataframe showing up as a dataframe

I have a column in my dataframe and this is bit odd.

when I do a class(df$Contributor) it shows that its a dataframe , dataframe whithin a dataframe ?? :(

> class(df$Contributor)
[1] "data.frame"
>

Is there any way I could change this to a factor ?

Here's a partial output from str(df1)

$ ArticleId  : Factor w/ 186 levels "10.1002/ajh.26",..: 167 24 130 136 5 15 20 179 175 70 ...
 $ Volume     : Factor w/ 93 levels "10","100","103",..: NA 12 NA 67 NA NA NA NA NA 18 ...
 $ Issue      : Factor w/ 14 levels "1","10","11",..: NA 11 NA 9 NA NA NA NA NA 8 ...
 $ Members    :'data.frame':    186 obs. of  1 variable:
  ..$ Contributor: chr  "Ellis Johnson A, Hernandez John , Erin Martin D, Doe Jane M" "Ibrahim Joseph A" "Tenzen E M, Zhao V, Jahn T, Lee S J, McCarthy P L, Izzo J D, Romi M, Drexler R, Dlesch S, Tim H, Atamandi N, Lee E, Persuzo"| __truncated__ "Croso, Tim Zi, Gram Lindsey R, Jackson Samuel J, Friedman Tom A, Johnson Boris J, Johnson Alan "| __truncated__ ...

I tried doing 

df$Contributor <- as.factor(df$Contributor)

I got an error

Error in sort.list(y) : 'x' must be atomic for 'sort.list'
Have you called 'sort' on a list?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 139

Answers (2)

lmo
lmo

Reputation: 38520

The following should also work:

d$z <- as.factor(unlist(d$z))

At least it did on @joran s example.

This will not work if the data.frame z has more than one column, but you will get an error indicating non-conforming sizes, which is reassuring.

Upvotes: 2

joran
joran

Reputation: 173737

You could try:

df$new_col <- as.factor(df$Members$Contributor)

and then remove the "bad" column via df$Members <- NULL.

You may have accidentally created this problem by doing something like:

df$Members <- Members

where Members was a one column data frame with a column called Contributor. For example, 

d <- data.frame(x = 1:5,y = 1:5)
d$z <- data.frame(z1 = letters[1:5])
> d
  x y z1
1 1 1  a
2 2 2  b
3 3 3  c
4 4 4  d
5 5 5  e
> str(d)
'data.frame':   5 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ x: int  1 2 3 4 5
 $ y: int  1 2 3 4 5
 $ z:'data.frame':  5 obs. of  1 variable:
  ..$ z1: Factor w/ 5 levels "a","b","c","d",..: 1 2 3 4 5

Upvotes: 3

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