About this question
Question description - I have a data frame. Let's call him bob:
> head(bob)
phenotype exclusion
GSM399350 3- 4- 8- 25- 44+ 11b- 11c- 19- NK1.1- Gr1- TER119-
GSM399351 3- 4- 8- 25- 44+ 11b- 11c- 19- NK1.1- Gr1- TER119-
GSM399352 3- 4- 8- 25- 44+ 11b- 11c- 19- NK1.1- Gr1- TER119-
GSM399353 3- 4- 8- 25+ 44+ 11b- 11c- 19- NK1.1- Gr1- TER119-
GSM399354 3- 4- 8- 25+ 44+ 11b- 11c- 19- NK1.1- Gr1- TER119-
GSM399355 3- 4- 8- 25+ 44+ 11b- 11c- 19- NK1.1- Gr1- TER119-
I'd like to concatenate the rows of this data frame (this will be another question). But look:
> class(bob$phenotype)
[1] "factor"
Bob's columns are factors. So, for example:
> as.character(head(bob))
[1] "c(3, 3, 3, 6, 6, 6)" "c(3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3)"
[3] "c(29, 29, 29, 30, 30, 30)"
I don't begin to understand this, but I guess these are indices into the levels of the factors of the columns (of the court of king caractacus) of bob? Not what I need.
Strangely I can go through the columns of bob by hand and do
bob$phenotype <- as.character(bob$phenotype)which works fine. And, after some typing, I can get a data.frame whose columns are characters rather than factors. So my question is: how can I do this automatically? How do I convert a data.frame with factor columns into a data.frame with character columns without having to manually go through each column?
