[R] nchar on data.frames

[ben@zoo.ufl.edu]

   Your character vector got turned into a factor (see ?data.frame).  One
way to track this kind of problem down is with the str() function.
For "read.table" there is an "as.is" parameter that will prevent this
happening, but it looks like for data.frame you have to do something like

data.frame(text=I(temp$text),numbers=temp$numbers))

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, David L. Tabb wrote:

> I don't understand why nchar() gives different string lengths for vectors
> in a list than it does for vectors in a dataframe.  Here's a snippet of
> code:
>
> > temp <- list(text=c("thug","jimbob","apple","thug"),numbers=1:4)
> > nchar(temp$text)
> [1] 4 6 5 4
> > temp <- data.frame(temp)
> > nchar(temp$text)
> [1] 1 1 1 1
>
> Could someone explain how I can get the former behavior for a text vector
> in a data.frame?
>
> Thanks!  RPM reports I'm using R-base-1.2.1-2.
>
> Dave
>
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