R Notebook

This code provides a solution to convert character data to numeric using coding in R. This is only recommend if you cannot convert your data using Excel.

setwd("~/Binghamton/Harp325")
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(ggplot2)

#we'll start by loading in some data to play with! We'll use data on US Comp Sci majors for this tutorial. 
majors <- read.csv("comp_sci_data.csv")

str(majors)

We can see here that the format does not look right! The reason is that there are commas in the numbers over 1000 - R assumes that these commas are character data.

#This code is complicated, but it basically removes the commas in the data
#To use, just replace the name "majors" with whatever dataframe you're using
majors <- apply(majors, 2, function(x) gsub(",", "", gsub("([a-zA-Z]),", "\\1 ", x)))
#the previous code converts the data to a matrix, so we need to convert it back to a dataframe
majors <- as.data.frame(majors)

#this code allows us to change only columns 3-13 to numeric 
majors[,3:13] <- sapply(majors[,3:13],as.numeric)

#Let's check our work - it works!
str(majors)