Search code examples
rcharacternumericcoerce

as.numeric("10^3") Warning message: NAs introduced by coercion

Trying to coerce this vector as numeric:

vec <- c("10^2", "10^3", "10^6", "", "10^9")

vec <- as.numeric(vec)

[1] NA NA NA NA NA

Warning message:
NAs introduced by coercion

Output desired:

[1] "100" "1000" "1e+06" "" "1e+09"

Solution

  • split the strings at ^ and then coerce each part individually. We have to escape using \\ because ^ is a special regex character.

    sapply(strsplit(vec, "\\^"), function(x){
    as.numeric(x[1])^as.numeric(x[2])
})
#[1] 1e+02 1e+03 1e+06    NA 1e+09