Converting a factor to numeric in R

Question

I know that variations of this question have been asked and answered, but I can't seem to get any to work for me.

I have a column labeled 'Interest.Rate', and the values are of this form: 12.75%

I tried:

as.numeric(as.character(loansData$Interest.Rate))

And what I got back was a screen full of 'NA's.

I suspect that I need to remove the '%' sign, but I'm not sure.

Any suggestions?

Jilber Urbina · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-12 19:39:43Z

5

You're right, you need to remove the '%' sign and then coerce the result to be numeric

> set.seed(1)
> Interest.Rate <- as.factor(paste0(sample(10), "%"))
> as.numeric(as.character(Interest.Rate))  # problem!!
 [1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

> as.numeric(gsub("\\%", "", Interest.Rate))  # solution
 [1]  3  4  5  7  2  8  9  6 10  1

answered Nov 12, 2013 at 19:39

Jilber Urbina

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3 Comments

americo Over a year ago

Same tool, different flavor: loansData$Interest.Rate <- as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9]", "",loansData$Interest.Rate))

A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1 Over a year ago

@ChelseaE, not if there are decimals as in the original post. Your "flavor" would strip the decimals out.

americo Over a year ago

Woops! You are completely correct @AnandaMahto, the right code should read loansData$Interest.Rate <- as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9\\.]", "",loansData$Interest.Rate)), thank you for your correction!

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