R, like all programming languages, has its quirks. One of the more frustrating ones is the way it acts when trying to convert a factor into a numeric variable.

Let’s start with a vector of numbers that have been mistakenly loaded as characters.

chars <- c("12","13","14","12","11","13","12")
chars
typeof(chars)

Here is the output

Now, let’s convert this vector to a numeric vector using the function as.numeric()

nums <- as.numeric(chars)
nums
typeof(nums)

And here is the output

As you can see it works fine.

But now let’s try it with a factor

fac <- factor(c("12","13","14","12","11","13","12"))
fac
typeof(fac)

Here is the output.

Now look what happens when I try the as.numeric() function

nums <- as.numeric(fac)
nums
typeof(nums)

Check out the results

While is says the type is a double, clearly the numbers are not correct.

How to fix it?

Well, the secret is that first you need to convert the factor into a character, then into a numeric.

nums <- as.numeric(as.character(fac))
nums
typeof(nums)

Now check out the results

Now we have the correct numbers. Just keep this little trick in mind. It has caused me some undue frustration in past.