Convert character longitude/latitude into numeric

1
votes

I have a dataset in R called Test with longitude latitude coordinates that now have the following format after having called str(Test):

    $ lat                         : chr "513.035.763.793.677"
    $ lon                         : chr "33.941.883.804.984"

I would like to turn these into correct lon - lat coordinates. The following doesn't work:

    as.numeric(Test$lat) 
    as.numeric(gsub(".", "", Test$lat)

I get:

[1] NA Warning message: NAs introduced by coercion

How can I transform them into numeric coordinates that are good to plot on a map? the correct coordinates should be lon: 3.394188 and lat: 51.30357

1
rcharacternumeric

1 Answers

2
votes

Try:

as.numeric(gsub(".", "", Test$lat, fixed = TRUE))
[1] 5.130358e+14

Without setting fixed = TRUE, gsub was treating "." as a regular expression.

To then get it to the format you were looking for, you simply need to multply by 1e-13:

5.130358e+14 * 1e-13
[1] 51.30358