How to convert a character to a numeric data type in R [closed]

Question

I have a big .csv file and one of the columns "ride_id" is a character type. I would like to convert it to numeric type but I get NA values.

ride_id        
<chr>       
3ED2B8BCE6A914EF    
7359345F8EB21CDC        
A62608C1D9DF9360        
20D609100DF8A71C    
6DF34F98F5DB335F    
E3194C33D112E064

I try using this code and it doesnt work:

ride_id = as.numeric(ride_id)

The reason I would like to convert the data type is to calculate the total into a separate column. This would then be used as a y variable in a geom_line.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Here are two possibilities.

1) type.convert

transform(ride_id, num = type.convert(paste0("0x", chr), as.is = TRUE))

giving:

               chr          num
1 3ED2B8BCE6A914EF 4.526884e+18
2 7359345F8EB21CDC 8.311732e+18
3 A62608C1D9DF9360 1.197227e+19
4 20D609100DF8A71C 2.366089e+18
5 6DF34F98F5DB335F 7.922764e+18
6 E3194C33D112E064 1.636419e+19

2) strotoi Break the character string up into 4 strings of 4 characters each, convert those using strtoi (which can only work on sufficiently short strings) and then matrix multiply that by the indicated vector.

transform(ride_id, num = chr |>
  textConnection() |>
  read.fwf(c(4, 4, 4, 4)) |>
  apply(2, strtoi, base = 16) |>
  t() |>
  crossprod(cbind((16^4)^(3:0))))

giving:

               chr          num
1 3ED2B8BCE6A914EF 4.526884e+18
2 7359345F8EB21CDC 8.311732e+18
3 A62608C1D9DF9360 1.197227e+19
4 20D609100DF8A71C 2.366089e+18
5 6DF34F98F5DB335F 7.922764e+18
6 E3194C33D112E064 1.636419e+19

Note

Lines <- "chr
3ED2B8BCE6A914EF
7359345F8EB21CDC
A62608C1D9DF9360
20D609100DF8A71C
6DF34F98F5DB335F
E3194C33D112E064"
ride_id <- read.table(text = Lines, header = TRUE)