cbind replaces String with number?

Question

x = iris$Sepal.Width;
y = iris$Species;

m = cbind(x,y);

the output of m is:

        x  y
  [1,] 3.5 1
  [2,] 3.0 1
  [3,] 3.2 1
  [4,] 3.1 1
  [5,] 3.6 1
  [6,] 3.9 1

but I want 'setosa', etc in column y instead of a number

how can I do that?

I want to combine the 2 Vectors because I want to filter afterwards with

m[m[,"y"]=="virginica",]

or is ther another oportunity to do that without cbind?

Answer 1

For vectors being combined with cbind, the result would be a matrix, which can only hold one type of data. Thus, the "Species" factor gets coerced to its underlying numeric value.

Try cbind.data.frame instead (or just data.frame) if you need your columns to have different data types.

> head(data.frame(x, y))
    x      y
1 3.5 setosa
2 3.0 setosa
3 3.2 setosa
4 3.1 setosa
5 3.6 setosa
6 3.9 setosa
> head(cbind.data.frame(x, y))
    x      y
1 3.5 setosa
2 3.0 setosa
3 3.2 setosa
4 3.1 setosa
5 3.6 setosa
6 3.9 setosa