asNumericDF {Ecdat}

R Documentation

Coerce to numeric dropping commas and info after a blank

Description

Delete commas (thousand separators) and drop information after a blank, then coerce to numeric and order the rows by the orderBy. Some Excel imports include commas as thousand separators; this replaces any commas with char(0), ”. Also, some character data includes footnote references following the year. Table F-1 from the US Census Bureau needs all three of these features: It needs orderBy, because the most recent year appears first, just the opposite of most other data sets where the most recent year appears last. It has footnote references following a character string indicating the year. And it includes commas as thousand separators.

Usage

asNumericChar(x)
asNumericDF(x, keep=function(x)any(!is.na(x)), orderBy)

Arguments

x	For asNumericChar, this is a character vector to be converted to numeric after gsub(',', '', x). For asNumericDF, this is a data.frame with all character columns to be converted to numerics.
keep	something to indicate which columns to keep
orderBy	Which columns to order the rows of x[, keep] by

Details

1. Replace commas by nothing

2. strsplit on ' ' and take only the first part, thereby eliminating the footnote references.

3. Replace any blanks with NAs

4. as.numeric

5. lapply(x, 1-4)

6. order the rows; by default, ascending on the first column

Value

all numeric data.frame

Author(s)

Spencer Graves

See Also

scan gsub Quotes

Examples

fakeF1 <- data.frame(yr=c('1948', '1947 (1)'),
                     q1=c('1,234', ''), duh=rep(NA, 2) )
nF1 <- asNumericDF(fakeF1)

nF1. <- data.frame(yr=asNumericChar(fakeF1$yr),
                   q1=asNumericChar(fakeF1$q1))[2:1,]

# correct answer
row.names(nF1.) <- 2:1

nF1c <- data.frame(yr=1947:1948, q1=c(NA, 1234))
row.names(nF1c) <- 2:1


all.equal(nF1, nF1.)


all.equal(nF1, nF1c)

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