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

Another way of doing it is by using the read.table() argument colClasses to specify the column type by making colClasses=c(*column class types*). If there are 6 columns whose members you want as numeric, you need to repeat the character string "numeric" six times separated by commas, importing the data frame, and as.matrix() the data frame. P.S. looks like you have headers, so I put header=T.

as.matrix(read.table(SFI.matrix,header=T,
colClasses=c("numeric","numeric","numeric","numeric","numeric","numeric"),
sep=","))