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I have a large vector of strings of the form:
Input = c("1,223", "12,232", "23,0")
etc. That's to say, decimals separated by commas, instead of periods. I want to convert this vector into a numeric vector. Unfortunately, as.numeric(Input) just outputs NA.
My first instinct would be to go to strsplit, but it seems to me that this will likely be very slow. Does anyone have any idea of a faster option?
There's an existing question that suggests read.csv2, but the strings in question are not directly read in that way.
711
And in countries where a point is used as a decimal separator, a comma is usually used to separate thousands. So, for example, twelve thousand five hundred with a decimal of five zero is written differently depending on the country: In the USA, Mexico, or the UK, it would be written: 12 500.50 or 12,500.50.
The character used as the decimal separator In the United States, this character is a period (.). In Germany, it is a comma (,). Thus one thousand twenty-five and seven tenths is displayed as 1,025.7 in the United States and 1.025,7 in Germany.
In English, we use commas to separate numbers greater than 999. We use a comma every third digit from the right. More than 50,000 people turned up to protest.
as.numeric(sub(",", ".", Input, fixed = TRUE)) should work.
57
The readr package has a function to parse numbers from strings. You can set many options via the locale argument.
For comma as decimal separator you can write:
readr::parse_number(Input, locale = readr::locale(decimal_mark = ","))
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