Data Types in R Programming Language

Rumman Ansari   Software Engineer   2023-01-22   6747 Share
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In contrast to other programming languages like C and Java in R, the variables are not declared as some data type. The variables are assigned with R-Objects and the data type of the R-object becomes the data type of the variable. There are many types of R-objects. The frequently used ones are ?

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

The simplest of these objects is the vector object and there are six data types of these atomic vectors, also termed as six classes of vectors. The other R-Objects are built upon the atomic vectors.

Data Type Example Verify
Logical TRUE, FALSE
var <- TRUE 
print(class(var))

it produces the following result ?

[1] "logical" 
Numeric 12.3, 5, 999
var <- 23.5
print(class(var))

it produces the following result ?

[1] "numeric"
Integer 2L, 34L, 0L
var <- 2L
print(class(var))

it produces the following result ?

[1] "integer"
Complex 3 + 2i
var <- 4+5i
print(class(var))

it produces the following result ?

[1] "complex"
Character 'a' , '"good", "TRUE", '23.4'
var <- "TRUE"
print(class(var))

it produces the following result ?

[1] "character"
Raw "Hello" is stored as 48 65 6c 6c 6f
var <- charToRaw("Hello")
print(class(var))

it produces the following result ?

[1] "raw" 
Date "2019-08-07"
date <- as.Date("2019-08-07")
class(date)

it produces the following result ?

[1] "Date"
date <- as.POSIXct("2019-08-07")
class(date)

it produces the following result ?

[1] "POSIXct" "POSIXt"