How to concatenate factors, without them being converted to integer level?

Question

I was surprised to see that R will coerce factors into a number when concatenating vectors. This happens even when the levels are the same. For example:

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Answer 1

An alternate workaround is to convert the factor to be a character vector, then convert back when you are finshed concatenating.

cfacs <- as.character(facs)
x <- c(cfacs[1:3], cfacs[4:5]) 

# Now choose between
factor(x)
# and
factor(x, levels = levels(facs))