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TADA_ConvertSpecialChars

Source: R/Utilities.R
TADA_ConvertSpecialChars.Rd

This function will screen a column of the user's choice for special characters. It creates a NEW column that describes the content of the column prior to conversion to numeric (named "TADA.COLUMN NAME DataTypes.Flag"). It also creates a NEW column to hold the new, numeric format (named "TADA.COLUMN NAME"). This function will successfully convert some special character formats to numeric: whitespace, >, <, ~, %, and commas are removed before converting a result value to numeric. Result values in the format # - # are converted to an average of the two numbers. Result values containing any other text or non-numeric characters become NA in the newly created "TADA.COLUMN NAME" and labeled accordingly in "TADA.COLUMN NAME DataTypes.Flag".

Usage

TADA_ConvertSpecialChars(.data, col, percent.ave = TRUE)

Arguments

.data

A TADA profile object

col

A character column to be converted to numeric

percent.ave

Boolean argument; default is percent.ave = TRUE. When clean = TRUE, any percent range values will be averaged. When percent.ave = FALSE, percent range values are not averaged, but are flagged.

Value

Returns the original dataframe with two new columns: the input column with the prefix "TADA.", which holds the numeric form of the original column, and "TADA.COLUMN NAME DataTypes.Flag", which has text describing the type of data contained within the column of interest, including "Numeric","Less Than" (<), "Greater Than" (>), "Approximate Value" (~), "Text" (A-z), "Percentage" (%), "Comma-Separated Numeric" (#,###), and "Numeric Range - Averaged" (# - #)

Examples

data(Data_Nutrients_UT)
HandleSpecialChars_ResultMeasureValue <- TADA_ConvertSpecialChars(Data_Nutrients_UT, "ResultMeasureValue")
unique(HandleSpecialChars_ResultMeasureValue$TADA.ResultMeasureValueDataTypes.Flag)
#> [1] "NA - Not Available" "Numeric"            "Text"              

HandleSpecialChars_DetLimMeasureValue <- TADA_ConvertSpecialChars(Data_Nutrients_UT, "TADA.DetectionQuantitationLimitMeasure.MeasureValue")
unique(HandleSpecialChars_DetLimMeasureValue$TADA.DetectionQuantitationLimitMeasure.MeasureValueDataTypes.Flag)
#> [1] "Numeric"            "NA - Not Available"