Part 3: improve consistency with as.factor() / as.character() conversion

Question

Part 3: improve consistency with as.factor() / as.character() conversion

pssachdeva opened this issue 3 years ago · 2 comments

At some points in the lesson, it appears that conversions from characters to factors are done, or vice versa. These are not done consistently. The default import does not convert the characters in the dataframe to factors, but later code blocks assume that these columns were already factors. They should be made consistent.

It is probably best to import the dataframes with stringsAsFactors = TRUE, and then make sure every conversion thereafter makes sense.

Answer 1 · 2021-10-06T19:05:48.000Z

As of R 4.0.0, this is the default behavior for data import as well in base R.

Answer 2 · 2021-12-16T19:22:42.000Z

Looking at this again, my previous comment was not clear. The default behavior in R 4.0.0 and onwards is that stringsAsFactors = FALSE.