Right way to convert data.frame to a numeric matrix, when df also contains strings?

Question

I have a data frame taken from a .csv-file which contains numeric and character values. I want to convert this data frame into a matrix. All containing information is number

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I solved it like this, by taking the original data frame without row names and adding them later

SFIo <- as.matrix(apply(SFI[,-1],2,as.numeric))
row.names(SFIo) <- SFI[,1]