How to convert character of percentage into numeric in R
Solution 1:
10% is per definition not a numeric vector. Therefore, the answer NA is correct. You can convert a character vector containing these numbers to numeric in this fashion:
percent_vec = paste(1:100, "%", sep = "")
as.numeric(sub("%", "", percent_vec))
This works by using sub to replace the % character by nothing.
Solution 2:
Remove the "%"
, convert to numeric, then divide by 100.
x <- c("10%","5%")
as.numeric(sub("%","",x))/100
# [1] 0.10 0.05
Solution 3:
If you're a tidyverse
user (and actually also if not) there's now a parse_number
function in the readr
package:
readr::parse_number("10%")
The advantage is generalization to other common string formats such as:
parse_number("10.5%")
parse_number("$1,234.5")
Solution 4:
Get rid of the extraneous characters first:
topct <- function(x) { as.numeric( sub("\\D*([0-9.]+)\\D*","\\1",x) )/100 }
my.data <- paste(seq(20)/2, "%", sep = "")
> topct( my.data )
[1] 0.005 0.010 0.015 0.020 0.025 0.030 0.035 0.040 0.045 0.050 0.055 0.060 0.065 0.070 0.075 0.080
[17] 0.085 0.090 0.095 0.100
(Thanks to Paul for the example data).
This function now handles: leading non-numeric characters, trailing non-numeric characters, and leaves in the decimal point if present.
Solution 5:
I wanted to convert an entire column and combined the above answers.
pct_to_number<- function(x){
x_replace_pct<-sub("%", "", x)
x_as_numeric<-as.numeric(x_replace_pct)
}
df[['ColumnName']] = pct_to_number(df[['ColumnName']])