type.convert to character using cSplit

Question

I have the following columns in my data.frame:

                services_01               services_02               services_03               services_04
             Privacy Policy                        NA                        NA                        NA
  Global Expense Management            Privacy Policy                        NA                        NA
 Exception & Cost Admin      Global Cost Estimate Global Expense Management            Privacy Policy

I created them by using df <- cSplit(df, 'services', ',').

Note that services was a comma-separated list, and after running the cSplit function, I get several new columns.

The problem is, it converts them to factors. I would like them to be characters.

I see the method takes a parameter type.convert but I don't know how to use it.

The documentation says this:

type.convert Logical. Should type.convert be used to convert the result of each column? This would add a little to the execution time.

How can I convert all the factors above to simple characters?

Answer 1

You can convert the 'factor' columns to 'character' using the data.table methods as the output of cSplit is a data.table

   df1 <- df[, lapply(.SD, as.character)]

Answer 2

Set type.convert = F to keep columns as strings.