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Working with percentages in R can be a little tricky, but it’s easy to change it to an integer, or numeric, and run the right statistics on it. Such as quartiles and mean and not frequencies.

data$column = as.integer(sub("%", "",data$column))



Essentially you are using the sub function and substituting the “%” for a blank. You don’t lose any decimals either! So in the end just remember that those are percentage amounts.

Next example is converting to a factor

data$column = as.factor(data$column)


Now you can read the data as discrete. This is great for categorical and nominal level variables.

Last example is converting to numeric. If you have a variable that has a dollar sign use this to change it to a number.

data$balance = as.factor(gsub(",", "", data$balance))
data$balance = as.numeric(gsub("\\$", "", data$balance))  Check out the before Balance : Factor w/ 40 levels "$1,000","\$10,000",..:
Utilization  : Factor w/ 31 levels "100%","11%","12%",


And after

Balance      : num  11320 7200 20000 12800 5700 ...
Utilization  : int  25 70 55 65 75


I hope this helps you with your formatting times! So simple and easy and you’ll be able to summarize your data!