removing particular character in a column in r

Question

I have a table called LOAN containing column named RATE in which the observations are given in percentage for example 14.49% how can i format the table so that all value in rate are edited and % is removed from the entries so that i can use plot function on it .I tried using strsplit.

strsplit(LOAN$RATE,"%")

but got error non character argument

Answer 1

Items that appear to be character when printed but for which R thinks otherwise are generally factor classes objects. I'm also guessing htat you are not going to be happy with the list output that strsplit will return Try:

gsub( "%", "", as.character(LOAN$RATE) n)

Factors which are appear numeric can be a source of confusion as well:

> factor("14.9%")
[1] 14.9%
Levels: 14.9%
> as.character(factor("14.9%"))
[1] "14.9%"
> gsub("%", "", as.character(factor("14.9%")) )
[1] "14.9"

This is especially confusing since print.data.frame removes hte quotes:

> data.frame(z=factor("14.9%"), zz=factor(14.9))
      z   zz
1 14.9% 14.9

Answer 2

LOAN$RATE <- sapply(LOAN$RATE, function(x), gsub("%", "", x))