several substitutions in one line R

Question

I have a column in a dataframe in R with values \"-1\",\"0\",\"1\". I\'d like to replace these values with \"no\", \"maybe\" and \"yes\" respectively. I\'ll do this by usi

Answer 1

factor is commonly used for this type of task, and leads to some pretty easily readable code:

vec <- c(0, 1, -1, -1, 1, 0)
vec
# [1]  0  1 -1 -1  1  0

factor(vec, levels = c(-1, 0, 1), labels = c("no", "maybe", "yes"))
# [1] maybe yes   no    no    yes   maybe
# Levels: no maybe yes

If you want just the character output, wrap it in as.character.

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If the column values are already strings, you just modify the levels argument in factor to use as.character:

vec2 <- as.character(c(0, 1, -1, -1, 1, 0))
vec2
# [1] "0"  "1"  "-1" "-1" "1"  "0" 

factor(vec2, levels = as.character(c(-1, 0, 1)), labels = c("no", "maybe", "yes"))
# [1] maybe yes   no    no    yes   maybe
# Levels: no maybe yes