how to determine if a character vector is a valid numeric or integer vector

Question

I am trying to turn a nested list structure into a dataframe. The list looks similar to the following (it is serialized data from parsed JSON read in using the httr package)

Answer 1

As discussed here, checking if as.numeric returns NA values is a simple approach to checking if a character string contains numeric data. Now you can do something like:

myDF2 <- lapply(myDF, function(col) {
  if (suppressWarnings(all(!is.na(as.numeric(as.character(col)))))) {
    as.numeric(as.character(col))
  } else {
    col
  }
})
str(myDF2)
# List of 3
#  $ w  : num [1:2] 1 2
#  $ x.y: num [1:2] 0.1 0.2
#  $ x.z: Factor w/ 2 levels "cat","dog": 1 2