Thank you gentlemen, I really appreciate all the comments On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.ber...@gene.com> wrote:
> Bogdan: > > I believe your query demonstrates the hazards of jumping into R without > first making an effort to read at least some of the supporting docs -- in > this case, I think, "An Intro to R" would have sufficed. > > R is not a video game nor even Excel. It is very powerful and quite > sophisticated software for doing some pretty hairy stuff, implemented in > its > "raw" form as an interactive programming language (apologies if this is not > the appropriate technical term). So, as I think you found out, it can make > some pretty daunting demands on a beginner even for simple things. If you > really need it's power and flexibility, once you've climbed the learning > curve, it's an extraordinarily productive tool. If you are just a casual > reader who doesn't need all that complex functionality, it's probably not > worth the effort or frustration. > > Anyway, the answer to your question -- which may require you to read the > docs to understand -- is that in R a "table" from read.table() is actually > a > data frame, which is also a special kind of list. As the error message > says, > as.numeric() cannot coerce recursive objects (which is what a list is) to > simple numeric vectors. > > Bert Gunter > Genentech Nonclinical Biostatisics > > -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] > On > Behalf Of Bogdan Tanasa > Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 1:59 PM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] a naive question > > Hi, and my apologies for the following very naive question : I would like > to > read a column of numbers in R and plot a histogram. > > eg : > > x<-read.table("txSTART"); > y<-as.numeric(x); > > and I do obtain the error : Error: (list) object cannot be coerced to type > 'double'. Please could you let me know the way to fix it. > > thanks, > > bogdan > <r-help@r-project.org> > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org 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. > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org 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.
