stringsAsFactors decides the strings will be considered as factors or just strings or characters. The following uses two examples to explains the difference.
Example 1: stringsAsFactors= FALSE
The following sets stringsAsFactors= FALSE. We can see that the data type of the column of Names is characters. (chr represents characters.)
# Create a dataframe in R, setting stringsAsFactors= FALSE
df <- data.frame(Names = c('Jack','Jess','Jacob'),
Ages = c(32,22,44),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
# print out the dataframe
print(df)
# check the datatype in the dataframe
str(df) Output:
Names Ages 1 Jack 32 2 Jess 22 3 Jacob 44 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 2 variables: $ Names: chr "Jack" "Jess" "Jacob" $ Ages : num 32 22 44
Example 2: stringsAsFactors= TRUE
The following sets stringsAsFactors= TRUE. We can see that the data type of the column of Names is Factor now.
# Create a dataframe in R, setting stringsAsFactors= TRUE
df <- data.frame(Names = c('Jack','Jess','Jacob'),
Ages = c(32,22,44),
stringsAsFactors = TRUE)
# print out the dataframe
print(df)
# check the datatype in the dataframe
str(df) Output:
Names Ages 1 Jack 32 2 Jess 22 3 Jacob 44 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 2 variables: $ Names: Factor w/ 3 levels "Jack","Jacob",..: 1 3 2 $ Ages : num 32 22 44