R help - Oct 2007 - data types changing

List,
I am attempting to take a row of data from one matrix to another if it satisfies
a certain condition.  When R puts the data in the new matrix it is changing the
characters to integers and giving them values which aren't very helpful to
my analysis.  I would use as.character, but I need to keep the double values as
is.  Is there a way to copy the entry exactly as is to the new matrix, without
having to use a separate statement for each entry.  I've included some code
below.  In my example all but row 5 are factors and should be kept as
characters, and column 7 has 2 levels, 1 or 2.  Column 5, the response is a
double.  Thanks for the help.


l = nrow(data)
n = 1
k = 1
data1trip = as.data.frame(rbind(1:7))
data2trip = as.data.frame(rbind(1:7))
colnames(data1trip) =...#my column names for data1trip
colnames(data2trip) =...# ""              "" data2trip
for(i in 1:l){
	if (data[i,7]=="1"){
	data1trip[k,] = data[i,]; k=k+1 }
	else {
	data2trip[n,] = data[i,]; n = n+1}
}


is the only other way to do what i want....

for(i in 1:l){
	if (data[i,7]=="1"){
	data1trip[k,1] = as.char(data[i,1]
        data1trip[k,2] = as.char(data[i,2]
        data1trip[k,3] = data[i,]
	.......


        else {
	and the same for those which have a "2" value in data[i,7]?
}

This second way seems a bit sloppy and i wanted to check if there existed a more
"professional" way to do it.

Thanks again,
Dave Mitchell