Comparing integers with characters in R [duplicate]

Question

It appears that as.character() of a number is still a number, which I find counter intuitive. Consider this example:

1 > "2"
[1] FALSE
2 > "1"
[1] TRUE

Even if I try to use as.character() or paste()

as.character(2)
[1] "2"
as.character(2) > 1
[1] TRUE
as.character(2) < 1
[1] FALSE

Why is that? Can't I have R return an error when I am comparing numbers with strings?

Answer 1

The documentation of ?Comparison states that

If the two arguments are atomic vectors of different types, one is coerced to the type of the other, the (decreasing) order of precedence being character, complex, numeric, integer, logical and raw.

So in your case the number is automatically coerced to string and the comparison is made based on the respective collation.

In order to prevent it, the only option I know of is to manually compare the class first.