R help - Jun 2008 - Convert character string to number

Hi,

I would like to convert a character vector

xxx <- c("1/2", "1/4")

to 

yyy <- c(0.5, 0.25)


, but as.numeric didn't work for me.  Could anyone give me a hint please?

Thanks,
Ken

On 21.06.2008, at 01:36, Ken Liu wrote:
> I would like to convert a character vector
>
> xxx <- c("1/2", "1/4")
>
> to
>
> yyy <- c(0.5, 0.25)
>
>
> , but as.numeric didn't work for me.  Could anyone give me a hint  
> please?
There are many many ways, and they're depending on the structure of  
xxx. If you only have such fractions you can use this na?ve approach:

as.numeric( gsub("(\\d+)/(\\d+)", "\\1", xxx, perl=T) ) /
as.numeric
( gsub("(\\d+)/(\\d+)", "\\2", xxx, perl=T) )

--Hans