Convert all columns to characters in a data.frame

r dataframe tidyverse
userJT picture userJT · May 4, 2017 · Viewed 37.1k times · Source

Consider a data.frame with a mix of data types.

For a weird purpose, a user needs to convert all columns to characters. How is it best done? A tidyverse attempt at solution is this:

map(mtcars,as.character) %>% map_df(as.list) %>% View()
c2<-map(mtcars,as.character) %>% map_df(as.list)

when I call str(c2) it should say a tibble or data.frame with all characters.

The other option would be some parameter settings for write.csv() or in write_csv() to achieve the same thing in the resulting file output.

Answer

Jake Thompson picture Jake Thompson · May 5, 2017

You can also use dplyr::mutate_all.

library(dplyr)
mtcars %>%
  mutate_all(as.character)

Related questions

How to transpose a dataframe in tidyverse?

Using basic R, I can transpose a dataframe, say mtcars, which has all columns of the same class: as.data.frame(t(mtcars)) Or with pipes: library(magrittr) mtcars %>% t %>% as.data.frame How to accomplish the same …

Read More
Remove rows with all or some NAs (missing values) in data.frame

I'd like to remove the lines in this data frame that: a) contain NAs across all columns. Below is my example data frame. gene hsap mmul mmus rnor cfam 1 ENSG00000208234 0 NA NA NA NA 2 ENSG00000199674 0 2 2 2 2 3 ENSG00000221622 0 NA NA NA NA 4 …

Read More
Drop data frame columns by name

I have a number of columns that I would like to remove from a data frame. I know that we can delete them individually using something like: df$x <- NULL But I was hoping to do this with …

Read More