Converting characters to numeric in dataframe

Question

Suppose I have a dataframe, "Election2000" with a column factor "presvote". Presvote has 3 possible values: "republican", "democrat", "NA".

How do I create a new variable, RVote, that converts all republican values to the value 1, and democrat values to 0?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about how to use R w/o a reproducible example. — gung - Reinstate Monica
– gung - Reinstate Monica, Commented Nov 10, 2014 at 22:13

Lizzie Silver · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-10 22:16:26Z

2

The command you are looking for is:

Election2000$RVote <- as.numeric(Election2000$presvote=="republican")

Edit: It works with this example data frame:

presvote <- c("democrat", "republican", "democrat", NA, "republican")
Election2000 <- data.frame(presvote)
Election2000$presvote <- as.factor(Election2000$presvote)

answered Nov 10, 2014 at 22:16

Lizzie Silver

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6 Comments

user4579 Over a year ago

Election2000$presvote automatically assigns numeric values 1, and 2 to republican and democrat. How do I switch these to 1 and 0 instead?

Lizzie Silver Over a year ago

@user4579 I need to see what you're looking at to know how to answer that. When you type Election2000$presvote , what does R return? Is it a factor column, or a numeric one?

user4579 Over a year ago

A factor column. I need to switch the factors from 1,2 to 0,1 to run logit and probit regressions

Lizzie Silver Over a year ago

@user4579 then I think the line above should work: Election2000\$RVote <- as.numeric(Election2000\$presvote=="republican") . But if it does not, try: Election2000\$RVote <- as.numeric(as.numeric(Election2000\$presvote)==2) . You should then have a new column, RVote, containing 0, 1 and NA values.

Lizzie Silver Over a year ago

@user4579 or more concisely: Election2000$RVote <- as.numeric(Election2000$presvote)-1

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