Data Frame Initialization - Character Initialization read as Factors?

Question

I am trying to initialize a data frame like this as I would like to have an empty data frame with two character vectors as columns

out_frame<-data.frame(Hospital = character(), State = character()

However, when I look at class of each column for this data frame, it shows a factor? What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

The data.frame function takes the following argument "stringsAsFactors". By default it is set to TRUE. Set it to FALSE to keep character from being cast to factors.

out_frame <- data.frame(Hospital = character(), State = character(), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
str(out_frame)