Petr, Removing the % signs by Ista's method works. However as I noted earlier, I was hoping there was a more elegant solution which deals with percentage and currency values without knowing about their presence beforehand.
It's a shame that something which Excel deals with trivially is such a hack in R. I'll try to delve deeper and write something which does this well. But my knowledge is limited and I will probably come back for help. For now, Henrique Dallazuanna provided me with the following solution using the gsubfn package. Now if only I can get it to install.... Lines <- "Store Year Revenue abc 2010 R$557889 def 2010 $D697356 ghi 2010 £321 jkl 2010 €21648" d <- read.table(textConnection(Lines), header = TRUE) closeAllConnections() colCurrency <- 'Revenue' library(gsubfn) newD <- transform(d, Revenue = strapply(as.character(d[,colCurrency]), pattern = "(\\w+\\W|\\W)|(\\d+)", backref = 1, simplify = rbind)) newD ----- Try http://prettygraph.com Pretty Graph , the easiest way to make R-powered graphs on the web. -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/How-to-read-percentage-and-currency-data-tp1567318p1567643.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ 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.