Coerce text to numeric, salvaging embedded numbers

A defensive helper for the common survey-export headache where a column that should be numeric arrives as text – "25 years", "8 - very likely", "3.5/5". It returns x unchanged if it is already numeric; otherwise it pulls the first number out of each value (via a digit pattern) and coerces to numeric, leaving genuinely unparseable entries as NA. The ezrsurvey functions that need numbers (e.g. calc_nps(), calc_summary()) call this for you, so they "just work" on lightly messy data.

Usage

ensure_numeric(x, name = NULL, quiet = FALSE)

Arguments

x

A vector. Numeric input is returned as-is.

name

Optional column/argument name, used only to make the message clearer.

quiet

If FALSE (default), emit a one-line message when coercion happens (and note any values that could not be parsed). Set TRUE to silence it.

Value

A numeric vector the same length as x.

Details

The first numeric token in each value is extracted with the pattern -?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+, which captures negatives and decimals but takes only the first number it finds – so "8 - very likely" becomes 8, not -8. A value that is genuinely numeric already is returned untouched (no copy, no message). When quiet = FALSE a single informative message reports that coercion happened and how many values could not be parsed; the internal callers (calc_nps(), calc_summary(), ipm_model(), bin_numeric(), ...) pass quiet = TRUE so they don't spam your console. Truly blank entries (""/NA) are not counted as parse failures.

See also

recode_age(), recode_likert(), na_blank().

Other recode: add_region(), bin_numeric(), clean_label(), drop_items(), generation_scheme(), na_blank(), nps_group(), recode_age(), recode_generation(), recode_likert(), recode_region(), split_multi()

Examples

ensure_numeric(c("25 years", "31", "forty"), quiet = TRUE)
#> [1] 25 31 NA

ensure_numeric(c("8 - very likely", "10", "3.5/5"), quiet = TRUE)
#> [1]  8.0 10.0  3.5

ensure_numeric(c(1, 2, 3))    # already numeric, returned as-is
#> [1] 1 2 3