What's the difference between data.frame and as.data.frame

[fish1]

I want to know what's the difference between data.frame and as.data.frame

[GreyMerchant]

Hello,

Look at this simple example I created below. Here we have a vector consisting of 1 to 6. I am able to take that vector and coerce it into a dataframe with as.data.frame which then gives me a data.frame with only one column in it. If you run the code as well you'd be able to see.

The data.frame is when we setup data to take on the form of a data.frame. So therefore it already has the states and properties of a data.frame. as.data.frame is just a convenient function to do this conversion for us on the fly so we can cbind as example these new bits of data to an existing data.frame etc.

library(tidyverse)

vector <- c(1,2,3,4,5,6)

str(vector)
#>  num [1:6] 1 2 3 4 5 6

vector <- vector %>% as.data.frame()

str(vector)
#> 'data.frame':    6 obs. of  1 variable:
#>  $ .: num  1 2 3 4 5 6

df <- data.frame(a = c(1,2,3,4,5,6),
                 b = c(2,3,4,5,6,7))

str(df)
#> 'data.frame':    6 obs. of  2 variables:
#>  $ a: num  1 2 3 4 5 6
#>  $ b: num  2 3 4 5 6 7

Created on 2020-10-26 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)