[R] Re: reading in columns of a data set as factors

[Faheem Mitha]

Dear people,

Replying to my own message here. The following appears to work. I read in
the data using read.table and then coerce the columns of the data frame to
factors afterwards.

clus.df <- read.table("clus.dat",header= FALSE, row.names=NULL,
col.names=names)

attach(clus.df)

for(i in 1:66)
clus.df[,i] <- as.factor(clus.df[,i])

However, I don't find this completely satisfactory. For one thing, I have
somehow got the impression that loops in Splus/R should be avoided
whenever possible (gee, I wonder where I got that impression) and so is
there a more elegant way to do this (without loops)?

                                                   Faheem.

On Wed, 26 Apr 2000, Faheem Mitha wrote:

> Dear people,
> 
> I've spent some time trying to find a simple way to do the following. I
> can certainly think of complicated ways to do it...
> 
> I have a data set of 99 columns and 2000 rows. Each row corresponds to an
> individual item of data, each column corresponds to a variable. I want
> this data to be read into a data frame. The first 66 columns are binary,
> values 0, 1, and I want these to be coerced into factor form. The last
> 33 are ordinary numeric data. For
> concreteness let us call these variables b1... b66 and the last 33
> x1... x33.
[stuff snipped]

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