replace column value from number to text

Question

I have monthly column value in number

df <- data.frame(Month= c("1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12", "1", "2", "3"))

I want to convert this to: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar

Can anyone help me with this please?

Thanking in advance for your time

month.abb[as.integer(df$Month)]. The month.abb is a base R constant. One unfortunate thing is that it is not locale-aware, so non-English months are not available via the same variable ... though it is rather easy to generate your own, since all it is is a character vector, length 12. — r2evans

Ricky Ricky · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-21T17:25:04

Not the most elegant or programmatic solution, but you could replace all the values with the mutate() function from the dplyr package:

library(dplyr)

df = mutate(df, Month = case_when(Month == "1" ~ "Jan",
                                  Month == "2" ~ "Feb",
                                  Month == "3" ~ "Mar",
                                  Month == "4" ~ "Apr",
                                  Month == "5" ~ "May",
                                  Month == "6" ~ "Jun",
                                  Month == "7" ~ "Jul",
                                  Month == "8" ~ "Aug",
                                  Month == "9" ~ "Sep",
                                  Month == "10" ~ "Oct",
                                  Month == "11" ~ "Nov",
                                  Month == "12" ~ "Dec")

You can find documentation for using case_when() here: https://dplyr.tidyverse.org/reference/case_when.html

An alternative programmatic solution based on the comment left by @r2evans to do this in one line using the built-in R object month.abb:

df = mutate(df, Month = month.abb[as.numeric(Month)])

replace column value from number to text

2 Answers