R - Converting Fractions in Text to Numeric

Question

I'm trying to convert, for example, '9¼"'to '9.25' but cannot seem to read the fraction correctly.

Here's the data I'm working with:

library(XML)

url <- paste("http://mockdraftable.com/players/2014/", sep = "")  
combine <- readHTMLTable(url,which=1, header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=F)

names(combine) <- c("Name", "Pos", "Hght", "Wght", "Arms", "Hands",
                    "Dash40yd", "Dash20yd", "Dash10yd", "Bench", "Vert", "Broad", 
                    "Cone3", "ShortShuttle20")

As an example, the Hands column in the first row is '9¼"', how would I make combine$Hands become 9.25? Same for all of the other fractions 1/8 - 7/8.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can try to transform the unicode encoding to ASCII directly when reading the XML using a special return function:

library(stringi)
readHTMLTable(url,which=1, header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=F,elFun=function(node) {
        val = xmlValue(node); stri_trans_general(val,"latin-ascii")})

You can then use @Metrics' suggestion to convert it to numbers.

You could do for example, using @G. Grothendieck's function from this post clean up the Arms data:

library(XML)
library(stringi)
library(gsubfn)
#the calc function is by @G. Grothendieck
calc <- function(s) {
        x <- c(if (length(s) == 2) 0, as.numeric(s), 0:1)
        x[1] + x[2] / x[3]
}

url <- paste("http://mockdraftable.com/players/2014/", sep = "")  

combine<-readHTMLTable(url,which=1, header=FALSE, stringsAsFactors=F,elFun=function(node) {
        val = xmlValue(node); stri_trans_general(val,"latin-ascii")})

names(combine) <- c("Name", "Pos", "Hght", "Wght", "Arms", "Hands",
                    "Dash40yd", "Dash20yd", "Dash10yd", "Bench", "Vert", "Broad", 
                    "Cone3", "ShortShuttle20")

sapply(strapplyc(gsub('\"',"",combine$Arms), "\\d+"), calc)

#[1] 30.000 31.500 30.000 31.750 31.875 29.875 31.000 31.000 30.250 33.000 32.500 31.625 32.875

There might be some encoding issues depending on your machine (see the comments)