| AsIs {base} | R Documentation | 
Change the class of an object to indicate that it should be treated “as is”.
I(x)
x | 
an object | 
Function I has two main uses.
data.frame.  Protecting an object by
enclosing it in I() in a call to data.frame inhibits the
conversion of character vectors to factors.  I can also be
used to protect objects which are to be added to a data frame, or
converted to a data frame via as.data.frame.
It achieves this by prepending the class "AsIs" to the object's
classes.  Class "AsIs" has a few of its own methods, including
for [, as.data.frame, print and format.
formula.  There it is used to
inhibit the interpretation of  operators such as "+",
"-", "*" and "^" as formula operators, so they
are used as arithmetical operators.  This is interpreted as a symbol
by terms.formula.
A copy of the object with class "AsIs" prepended to the class(es).
Chambers, J. M. (1992) Linear models. Chapter 4 of Statistical Models in S eds J. M. Chambers and T. J. Hastie, Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.