Entire character vector saved as a single string in R

Question

I have some vectors I accidentally formatted the entire thing as character and now I can't revert it back into it being a vector. Is there a way to do this without going into regex?

Example

print(df[10])
[1] "c(\"1963-09-16\", \"1969-07-16\")"

print(length(df[10)))
[1] 1

Answer 1

You can try:

library(tidyverse)

eval(parse(text = "c(\"1963-09-16\", \"1969-07-16\")") )
#> [1] "1963-09-16" "1969-07-16"

Or from a df

df <- data.frame(dates = rep("c(\"1963-09-16\", \"1969-07-16\")", 5))

summarise(df, dates = map(dates, function(x) eval(parse(text = x))) %>%
  reduce(c))
#>         dates
#> 1  1963-09-16
#> 2  1969-07-16
#> 3  1963-09-16
#> 4  1969-07-16
#> 5  1963-09-16
#> 6  1969-07-16
#> 7  1963-09-16
#> 8  1969-07-16
#> 9  1963-09-16
#> 10 1969-07-16

^{Created on 2021-12-07 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}