Right way to convert data.frame to a numeric matrix, when df also contains strings?

Question

I have a data frame taken from a .csv-file which contains numeric and character values. I want to convert this data frame into a matrix. All containing information is number

Answer 1

Edit 2: See @flodel's answer. Much better.

Try:

# assuming SFI is your data.frame
as.matrix(sapply(SFI, as.numeric))  

Edit: or as @ CarlWitthoft suggested in the comments:

matrix(as.numeric(unlist(SFI)),nrow=nrow(SFI))