Change Numeric Variables to be Categorical in R

Question

Short and sweet here...

I have ZIP codes in the dataframe I am analyzing in R.

R is reading them as numeric variables. How can I have R read these ZIP codes (e.g., 20001) as a categorical variable.

Answer 1

(Just making my comment an answer)

You can use

data$ZIP <- as.character(data$ZIP) 

or

data$ZIP <- as.factor(data$ZIP)

depending on the variable type you prefer to work with.