as.character，用于将一列中的值替换为另一列中的值

Question

I have a dataframe with a series of Initials and Names. However, occasionally Names were erroneously sitting in the Initials field, with the Name field being blank. It looked like this:

Initials <- c('JB', 'MJ', 'SF', 'Obi Wan Kanobi', 'Luke Skywalker', 'LO', 'Darth 
              Vader', 'JS', 'MM', 'John Paul')
Name <- c('John Brown', 'Mike Jones', 'Sally Fields', '', '', 'Leia Organa', '', 
           'Joey Scarface', 'Marilyn Monroe', '')
test <- data.frame(Initials, Name)

I want to create a Name2 field, where any blanks in the Name field are populated with the corresponding name in the Initials field. Otherwise, I just want the Name2 field to be populated with values from the Name field (eg 'John Paul' is in Initials, but Name is blank -- I want Name2 to have the value 'John Paul'. 'John Brown' is in Name, and I want it to just show up in Name2).

I tried the following code, but it simply spit out a vector of numbers for Name2:

test$Name2 <- ifelse(test$Name == '', test$Initials, test$Name)

Answer 1

This was a simple matter of correctly defining the field types. In this case, all my input fields were recognized as factors rather than characters. So the successful code looked like this:

test$Name2 <- ifelse(test$Name == '', as.character(test$Initials), as.character(test$Name))