Thanks everyone for your helpful responses. I looked at the csv file in a text editor and saw no spaces or non-numerical characters (other than periods as decimals) outside of the header. str() says me that the variables are either num or int.
David was spot-on; I was trying > storage.mode(~miles) [1] "language" instead of > storage.mode(hikes$miles) [1] "double" The fault was in my grasp of R's syntax, not the data. Thanks! On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:09 AM, David Winsemius <[email protected]>wrote: > > On May 1, 2012, at 8:47 PM, Eve Proper wrote: > > I am a raw novice to R, playing around with a mini .csv dataset created in >> Excel. I can read it in and the data looks OK in Excel and upon initial >> inspection in R: >> >> hikes <- read.csv("/Users/eproper/**Desktop/hikes.csv", header=TRUE) >> print(hikes) >> >> does exactly what it is supposed to do. >> >> Two of the variables are genuine strings, but the others ought to be >> numeric, and R will calculate their min, max etc. However, is.numeric >> returns FALSE for all of them; >> > > How did you do this? What code did you use? It should have been: > > lapply(hikes, is.numeric) > > storage.mode returns "language." >> > > Well, that suggests that you were trying to use unquoted variable names > without the data objects name. Did you use attach() on the basis of some > misguided instructions? > > > > as.numeric >> returns "Error: 'pairlist' object cannot be coerced to type 'double'." In >> what I suspect is a related problem, any command that calls for a variable >> name requires an initial ~ to work. That is, instead of plot(miles) I have >> to use plot(~miles). >> > > As I said, you are not correctly referencing column names within data > objects. > > >> No doubt there is some very elementary mistake I am making, but I can't >> figure it out. Any help would be appreciated. >> >> <http://theturducken.blogspot.**com/ <http://theturducken.blogspot.com/>> >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> > > And you should read the Posting Guide and correct your posting format. > > > >> ______________________________**________________ >> [email protected] mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/**listinfo/r-help<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help> >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/** >> posting-guide.html <http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html> >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >> > > David Winsemius, MD > Heritage Laboratories > West Hartford, CT > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
