Question

I am importing a 3 column CSV file. The final column is a series of entries which are either an integer, or a string in quotation marks.

Here are a series of example entries:

1,4,"m"
1,5,20
1,6,"Canada"
1,7,4
1,8,5

When I import this using read.csv, these are all just turned in to factors.

How can I set it up such that these are read as integers and strings?

Thank you!

Answer 1

This is not possible, since a given vector can only have a single mode (e.g. character, numeric, or logical).

However, you could split the vector into two separate vectors, one with numeric values and the second with character values:

vec <- c("m", 20, "Canada", 4, 5)

vnum <- as.numeric(vec)
vchar <- ifelse(is.na(vnum), vec, NA)

vnum
[1] NA 20 NA  4  5

vchar
[1] "m"      NA       "Canada" NA       NA