How to avoid warning when introducing NAs by coercion

Korone picture Korone · Feb 20, 2013 · Viewed 222.8k times · Source

I generally prefer to code R so that I don't get warnings, but I don't know how to avoid getting a warning when using as.numeric to convert a character vector.

For example:

x <- as.numeric(c("1", "2", "X"))

Will give me a warning because it introduced NAs by coercion. I want NAs introduced by coercion - is there a way to tell it "yes this is what I want to do". Or should I just live with the warning?

Or should I be using a different function for this task?

Answer

Andrie picture Andrie · Feb 20, 2013

Use suppressWarnings():

suppressWarnings(as.numeric(c("1", "2", "X")))
[1]  1  2 NA

This suppresses warnings.