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POConvert data.frame columns from factors to characters
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copied!<p>I have a data frame. Let's call him <code>bob</code>:</p> <pre><code>> 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- </code></pre> <p>I'd like to concatenate the rows of this data frame (this will be another question). But look:</p> <pre><code>> class(bob$phenotype) [1] "factor" </code></pre> <p><code>Bob</code>'s columns are factors. So, for example:</p> <pre><code>> as.character(head(bob)) [1] "c(3, 3, 3, 6, 6, 6)" "c(3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3)" [3] "c(29, 29, 29, 30, 30, 30)" </code></pre> <p>I don't begin to understand this, but I guess these are indices into the levels of the factors of the columns (of the court of king caractacus) of <code>bob</code>? Not what I need.</p> <p>Strangely I can go through the columns of <code>bob</code> by hand, and do</p> <pre><code>bob$phenotype <- as.character(bob$phenotype) </code></pre> <p>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? </p> <p>Bonus question: why does the manual approach work?</p>

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