Coercion :

Coercion includes type conversion . Type conversion means change of one type of data into another type of data. We have to type of coercion occurs :

 1. Implicit Coercion

 2. Explicit Coercion

Explicit Coercion :

In explicit coercion , we can change one data type to another data type by applying function.

We create an object “x” which stores integer values from 1 to 6.

x<-0:6

We can check data type of “x” object.

class(x)

We used as.numeric() to change integer data type to numeric data type.

z<-as.numeric(x)

We check data type of z. It shows “numeric” data type.

class(z)

We can also change character data to numeric data as:

We also changed logical data to character data.

We also changed integer data to Logical data as:

When we changed numeric or integer to logical data , it will store 0 as FALSE and other values as TRUE. You can see here also .

Some exceptions of explicit coercion :-

We are converting character data type to numeric data type. It will show NA . It will show missing in out object. It will not change character data to numeric because it includes values “a” which cannot be changed to numeric data.

Implicit Coercion :

When type conversion occurs by itself in R.

We input numeric and character data in an object . R converts numeric data to character data by itself.

We input logical and numeric data in an object . Logical data convert to numeric data implicitly.

There are many types of objects to store R-object . The frequently used objects are –

• Vectors
• Matrices
• Arrays
• Factors
• Data Frames
• Lists
• Table