R character vectors into factors

Question

I have a character vector of the type a<- c('ES1-5', 'ES14-26', 'ES27-38', 'ES6-13', 'SA1-13', 'SA14-25') and it is a column of a dataframe.

What I would like to do is to transform into a factor with levels 1,2,3,4,5,6 and subsequently transform into a numerical vector of 1,2,3,4,5,6 and colbind into the dataframe.

Could someone give me an elegant way to do this please.

Answer 1

You can use as.numeric(as.factor))

##Some random data##
a<- c('ES1-5', 'ES14-26', 'ES27-38', 'ES6-13', 'SA1-13', 'SA14-25')
x <- tibble(x = rnorm(6),
                y = rnorm(6),
                a = a) ##Append vector a as column in a dataframe

##Make a into a factor and append to the dataframe
x$a_factor <- as.numeric(factor(x$a))
x