Convert dataframe numeric column to character : <p>I have a data frame with character and numeric columns, when plotting a PCA later on, I need to plot character columns so I wanted to convert column "station" to character.</p>

<p>The data frame:</p>

<pre><code>coldata &lt;- data.frame(Location = c(West,West,East,East),
                          Station = c(1,2,3,4),
                          A = c("0.3","0.2","0.8","1"))
</code></pre>

<p>And the type of columns:</p>

<pre><code>sapply(coldata, mode) location station A
    "character" "numeric" "numeric"
</code></pre>

<p>I would like to have this:</p>

<pre><code>sapply(coldata, mode) location station A
"character" "character" "numeric"
</code></pre>

<p>Can a column be labelled as "character" if containing numbers? Or would I have to convert the numbers into words: ie: 1, 2, 3,4 to one, two, three, four? </p>

<p>I have seen many posts converting character into numeric, but not numeric to character.</p>
