Replace logical values (TRUE / FALSE) with numeric (1 / 0)

Question

I am exporting data from R with the command:

write.table(output,file = "data.raw", na "-9999", sep = "\\t", row.names = FALSE, c         


        

Answer 1

As Ted Harding pointed out in the R-help mailing list, one easy way to convert logical objects to numeric is to perform an arithmetic operation on them. Convenient ones would be * 1 and + 0, which will keep the TRUE/FALSE == 1/0 paradigm.

For your mock data (I've changed the code a bit to use regular R packages and to reduce size):

df    <- data.frame(cbind(1:10, rnorm(10) > 0))
df$X3 <- df$X2 == 1
df$X4 <- df$X2 != 1

The dataset you get has a mixture of numeric and boolean variables:

   X1 X2    X3    X4
1   1  0 FALSE  TRUE
2   2  0 FALSE  TRUE
3   3  1  TRUE FALSE
4   4  1  TRUE FALSE
5   5  1  TRUE FALSE
6   6  0 FALSE  TRUE
7   7  0 FALSE  TRUE
8   8  1  TRUE FALSE
9   9  0 FALSE  TRUE
10 10  1  TRUE FALSE

Now let

df2 <- 1 * df

(If your dataset contains character or factor variables, you will need to apply this operation to a subset of df filtering out those variables)

df2 is equal to

   X1 X2 X3 X4
1   1  0  0  1
2   2  0  0  1
3   3  1  1  0
4   4  1  1  0
5   5  1  1  0
6   6  0  0  1
7   7  0  0  1
8   8  1  1  0
9   9  0  0  1
10 10  1  1  0

Which is 100% numeric, as str(df2) will show you.

Now you can safely export df2 to your other program.