Coercion happens with data types in R, often implicitly, so that the data can accommodate all the values. For example,
x = 1:3
x
[1] 1 2 3
typeof(x)
#[1] "integer"
x[2] = "hi"
x
#[1] "1" "hi" "3"
typeof(x)
#[1] "character"
Notice that at first, x
is of type integer
. But when we assigned x[2] = "hi"
, all the elements of x
were coerced into character
as vectors in R can only hold data of single type.