Make a character vector a numeric vector in R?

Question

I have created a character vector using paste, for example:

y <- paste("a=1,b=2,c=3")  

If I try to combine it:

x <- c(y)  

I get:

[1] "a=1,b=2,c=3"  

I would like to get the same as if I did:

c(a=1,b=2,c=3)  

which gives:

a b c   
1 2 3

Sorry if this is too basic, I am new to R (and the site). Thanks!

Answer 1

I wonder if this is what your really want, but since you asked, here it is. This is not considered good practice, but perhaps you have a use case that would make it useful.

> eval( parse(text=paste("c(", y, ")" ) ) )
a b c 
1 2 3 

The answedr fron Nader hints at what appears to be a missunderstanding about constructing R character variables. The paste functions seems entirely superfluous for building y: Just doing this is equivalent:

y <- "a=1,b=2,c=3"

Answer 2

Is not clear what you want, but one option:

sepstr<-function(list,sep=",")unlist(strsplit(list, sep, fixed = TRUE))

d=sapply(sepstr(y),sepstr, sep="=")
x=as.numeric(d[2,])
names(x)=d[1,]
x

Or as @thelatemail suggested:

x2=setNames(as.numeric(d[2,]),d[1,])
x2

Answer 3

y <- c("a=1,b=2,c=3")

list <- lapply(strsplit(y , ","), function(x){
  strsplit(x , "=")
})

rapply(list, function(x){
  setNames(x[2] , x[1])
})

# a   b   c 
#"1" "2" "3"