min（）为什么不返回实际最小值？

Question

I'm trying to find the minimum value in a list of numerical values in a table using the function min() in R, but I've noticed that it sometimes doesn't return the actual lowest numerical value.

For instance, if the list consisted of 7.760, 12.015, 13.043, and 70.789, if I did min(list), it would return 12.015 as the minimum value and not 7.760. I noticed by just manually sorting the table of values from lowest to highest using the arrows at the top of the column in the table, it would return the order of 12.015, 13.043, 7.760, 70.789 as if ranking the values by the first digit instead of the number as a whole.

Is there a way to fix it or a different function to use in this case?

Answer 1

Sounds like your numbers are actually character strings

vec <- c(7.760, 12.015, 13.043, 70.789)

min(vec)
# [1] 7.76

vec <- as.character(vec)
min(vec)
# [1] "12.015"

Simply convert them to numeric with as.numeric(vec) , then min() will behave as expected