Remove thousand's separator
apply, decimal, excel, r, separator
Solution
I think I just found another solution:
It's necessary to use `stringsAsFactors = FALSE`.
Like this:
df2 <- as.data.frame(apply(df1, 2, gsub, pattern = "([0-9])\\.([0-9])", replacement= "\\1\\2"), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
df3 <- as.data.frame(data.matrix(df2))
Problem
I imported an Excel file and got a data frame like this ``` structure(list(A = structure(1:3, .Label = c("1.100", "2.300", "5.400"), class = "factor"), B = structure(c(3L, 2L, 1L), .Label = c("1.000.000", "500", "7.800"), class = "factor"), C = structure(1:3, .Label = c("200", "3.100", "4.500"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("A", "B", "C" ), row.names = c(NA, -3L), class = "data.frame") ``` I would now like to convert these `chars` to `numeric` or even `integer`. However, the dot character (`.`) is not a decimal sign but a "thousand's separator" (it's German). How would I convert the data frame properly? I tried this: ``` df2 <- as.data.frame(apply(df1, 2, gsub, pattern = "([0-9])\\.([0-9])", replacement= "\\1\\2")) df3 <- as.data.frame(data.matrix(df2)) ``` however, `apply` seems to convert each column to a list of factors. Can I maybe prevent `apply` from doing so?