Coercion

Introduction#

Coercion happens in R when the type of objects are changed during computation either implicitly or by using functions for explicit coercion (such as as.numeric, as.data.frame, etc.).

Implicit Coercion

Coercion happens with data types in R, often implicitly, so that the data can accommodate all the values. For example,

x = 1:3
x
[1] 1 2 3
typeof(x)
#[1] "integer"

x[2] = "hi"
x
#[1] "1"  "hi" "3" 
typeof(x)
#[1] "character"

Notice that at first, x is of type integer. But when we assigned x[2] = "hi", all the elements of x were coerced into character as vectors in R can only hold data of single type.