several substitutions in one line R

Question

I have a column in a dataframe in R with values \"-1\",\"0\",\"1\". I\'d like to replace these values with \"no\", \"maybe\" and \"yes\" respectively. I\'ll do this by usi

Answer 1

This could also be an evil application for switch:

set.seed(1492)
thing <- sample(c(-1, 0, 1), 100, replace=TRUE)
sapply(as.character(thing), switch, `-1`="no", `0`="maybe", `1`="yes", USE.NAMES=FALSE))

If they are in fact characters already you can leave off the as.character() bit.

NOTE: I'm not necessarily recommending this, just showing all the possible ways (and this is more of a way out of twisty mazes of ifelse passages).

IMO factors are the way to go.