在数据集点r的列中转换逗号

Question

I've imported from excel a dataset. And I have a column 'Height' and I would want to replace the ',' by '.' . I tried with this command but it gives me error.

apply(apply(DATASET$Height, 2, gsub, patt=",", replace="."), 2, as.numeric)

Thank you very much for your help

Answer 1

To recode column 'Height' in data frame 'DATASET':

DATASET$Height <- gsub(",",".",DATASET$Height,fixed=TRUE)

Any errors? If no you can proceed to convert the column to numeric. Get errors when converting to numeric? Perhaps you have still other characters besides "," that prevent R from reading the values as numbers. In that case you would need to apply gsub a second time to remove all non-numeric characters.

Answer 2

First, you should check if it is character. Then, I would split the strings by the comma, then paste them with a dot:

suppose a is what you get with DATASET[["Height"]]

a <- c("234,23", "2314,54", "234,65")

then with sapply , you can split and collapse each character element:

b <- sapply(a,
  function(string){
    paste0(unlist(strsplit(string, split=",")),collapse=".")
  })

Now, you can replace the DATASET[["Height"]] with b .