Coercing a character to a numeric in R

Question

I'm a newbie to R and I've learnt that a character string like "12.5" can be coerced to a numeric using as.numeric() function, which gives me the following result.

> as.numeric("12.5")
[1] 12.5

But when I try following, the result doesn't contain the fractional part.

> as.numeric("12.0")
[1] 12

is there a way to keep the fractional part in the result...

Thanks in advance...

As @MatthewLundberg points out there is no fractional part to keep. Note that there is a difference between what is stored and what is displayed. You can get R to show a certain number of digits after the decimal place no matter what but that is a different question. — Dason, May 23 '14 at 03:22
Hi Dason, "You can get R to show a certain number of digits after the decimal place no matter what". If you can show me how to do that it would be a great help... — Pavithra Gunasekara, May 23 '14 at 03:24
Take a look at `?sprintf`. ` sprintf("%.1f", as.numeric("12"))` — Dason, May 23 '14 at 03:59

Rich Scriven · Answer 1 · 2014-05-23T04:36:24.807

Is it really necessary to print whole numbers that way? If you're worried about how it will appear with other numbers, say in a vector or data frame, not to worry. If you have at least one decimal number in the vector, the whole number will appear as a decimal as well.

> as.numeric(c("12.0", "12.1"))
## [1] 12.0 12.1

> data.frame(x = as.numeric(c("12.0", "12.1")))
##      x
## 1 12.0
## 2 12.1

If it's simply for appearance purposes, there are a few functions that can make 12.0 appear numeric. Keep in mind, however that this does not coerce to numeric, even though it looks like it does.

> noquote("12.0")
## [1] 12.0

> cat("12.0")
## 12.0

Coercing a character to a numeric in R

1 Answers1