only some characters change to numeric when converting in R

Question

I need to convert the Votes column variable on the following data frame from character to numeric without adding NA’s

 > res
                  Party              Votes                  
 1 Progressive Liberal Party         28,599           
 2    Free National Movement         19,781           
 3 Commonwealth Labour Party            254            
 4              Independents            753            
 5       Invalid/blank votes                             
 6                     Total         49,387            

 > str(res)
'data.frame':   7 obs. of  5 variables:
$ Party: chr  "Progressive Liberal Party" "Free National Movement" 
"Commonwealth Labour Party" "Independents" ...
$ Votes: chr  "28,599" "19,781" "254" "753" ...

I have found this post on StackOverflow with a number of suggestions and I tried the following methods

Using transform

D <- transform(res, Votes = as.numeric(Votes))

However, this leads to only a few numbers converting to numeric. See below

using as.character and then using as.numeric
```
  as.numeric(as.character(res$Votes))
```
But that leads to the same issue
```
NA  NA 254 753  NA  NA  NA
```

How do I ensure that all numbers in the vote column are converted to numeric?

First get rid of the commas: `sub(",", "", res$Votes)`. Then `as.numeric/as.character`. — Rui Barradas, Sep 21 '17 at 17:23

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 21 '17 at 17:50

3

To convert numbers that have commas, dollar signs, or similar formatting, use parse_number() from the readr package.

> library(readr)
> parse_number("28,599")
[1] 28599

answered Sep 21 '17 at 17:50

Sam Firke

21,571
9
87
105

You can also just use `readr::read_csv` to import your CSV file in the first place, and avoid the whole problem. – Mike Stanley Sep 21 '17 at 19:01

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 21 '17 at 17:26

1

The comma is throwing it off, you need to remove it first using gsub.

res$Votes <- as.numeric(gsub(",", "", res$Votes))

answered Sep 21 '17 at 17:26

Eric Watt

3,180
9
21

In my comment above, I forgot that `gsub` returns `character`, there's no need to use it again. – Rui Barradas Sep 21 '17 at 17:56

only some characters change to numeric when converting in R

2 Answers2