Replacing commas and dots in R

Question

I have a whole column of numbers that include dot separators at the thousands and comma instead of dot as an dismal separator. When I try to create a numeric column out of t

Answer 1

For things like these I like scan() the most, because it is easy to understand. Just use

scan(text=var1, dec=",", sep=".")

Alas, it's not faster than gsub(), which on the other hand seemes overpowered. Hence another, and fast, option is sub():

as.numeric(sub(",", ".", sub(".", "", var1, fixed=TRUE), fixed=TRUE))

And just in case: When you're reading var1 from a file directly, just read it in with a specified separator: read.table("file.txt", dec=",", sep=".")