Suppose that I have a dataset traffic with a column Traffic_count that displays the traffic count for each traffic counting station:

The problem is that Traffic_count is interpreted as a float type while the values should represent integer numbers. As an example, when I generate a new column Traffic_count_TimesTen which is formulated as traffic$Traffic_count*10, the resulting table is:

When I apply traffic$Traffic_count <- as.integer(traffic$Traffic_count) the values for Traffic_count will just be 25, 66 and 5 respectively.

Applying traffic$Traffic_count <- as.numeric(gsub(".","",traffic$Traffic_count)) to remove the point that defines the type float, results in NA.

How can I convert the values of Traffic_count to integer numbers so that the values in Traffic_count are regarded as 24592, 65500, 4976 and the values in Traffic_count_TimesTen are regarded as 245920, 655000 and 49760?

CodePudding user response：

your gsub solution is almost correct.Try the following:

traffic$Traffic_count <- as.numeric(gsub("\\.","",traffic$Traffic_count))

Explanation

. is a special sign in regex, meaning "any" character, therefore it will replace every letter with "". If you exlicitly want to replace a dot, you need to put a \ in front of it. But as R tries to interpret a single "" within a string we need to tell R itself not to preprocess the slash with another slash. therefore \\