Coerce variables in data frame to appropriate format

Question

I\'m working a data frame which consists of multiple different data types (numerics, characters, timestamps), but unfortunately all of them are received as characters. Hence I n

Answer 1

You should check dataPreparation package. You will find function findAndTransformNumerics function that will do exactly what you want.

require(dataPreparation)
data("messy_adult")
sapply(messy_adult[, .(num1, num2, mail)], class)
   num1        num2        mail 
"character" "character"    "factor" 

messy_adult is an ugly data set to illustrate functions from this package. Here num1 and num2 are strings :/

messy_adult <- findAndTransformNumerics(messy_adult)
[1] "findAndTransformNumerics: It took me 0.18s to identify 3 numerics column(s), i will set them as numerics"
[1] "setColAsNumeric: I will set some columns as numeric"
[1] "setColAsNumeric: I am doing the columnnum1"
[1] "setColAsNumeric: 0 NA have been created due to transformation to numeric."
[1] "setColAsNumeric: I will set some columns as numeric"
[1] "setColAsNumeric: I am doing the columnnum2"
[1] "setColAsNumeric: 0 NA have been created due to transformation to numeric."
[1] "setColAsNumeric: I am doing the columnnum3"
[1] "setColAsNumeric: 0 NA have been created due to transformation to numeric."
[1] "findAndTransformNumerics: It took me 0.09s to transform 3 column(s) to a numeric format."

Here we performed the search and it logged what it found

And know:

sapply(messy_adult[, .(num1, num2, mail)], class)
     num1      num2      mail 
"numeric" "numeric"  "factor" 

Hope it helps!

Disclamer: I'm the author of this package.