如何使用“意外符号”错误重新编码R中的字符变量

Question

I want to recode my data from character to numeric. Here is my failed attempt:

library(car) # needed for recode
survey1$V16a = recode(survey1$V16, "'Very important'=1; 'Fairly important'=2; 'Not very important'=3; 'Not important at all'=4; 'Can't choose'=99;", as.numeric.result=TRUE)

This is the error message I subsequently receive

Error in recode(survey1$V16, "'Very important'=1; 'Fairly important'=2; 'Not very important'=3; 'Not important at all'=4; 'Can't choose'=99;", :

in recode term: 'Can't choose'=99 message: Error in parse(text = strsplit(term, "=")[[1]][1]) : :1:7: unexpected symbol 1: 'Can't

Answer 1

There's no real need to use an extra package such as car for this. It also makes the code less readable in my opinion. Just use ifelse .

survey1$V16a <- ifelse(survey1$V16a == "Very important", 1, 
                ifelse(survey1$V16a == "Fairly important", 2,
                ifelse(survey1$V16a == "Not very important", 3,
                .... )))))