[r] Creating a data frame from two vectors using cbind

Consider the following R code.

> x = cbind(c(10, 20), c("[]", "[]"), c("[[1,2]]","[[1,3]]"))
> x
     [,1] [,2] [,3]     
[1,] "10" "[]" "[[1,2]]"
[2,] "20" "[]" "[[1,3]]"

Similarly

> x = rbind(c(10, "[]", "[[1,2]]"), c(20, "[]", "[[1,3]]"))
> x
     [,1] [,2] [,3]     
[1,] "10" "[]" "[[1,2]]"
[2,] "20" "[]" "[[1,3]]"

Now, I don't want the integers 10 and 20 to be converted to strings. How can I perform this operation without any such conversion? I would of course also like to know why this conversion happens. I looked at the cbind help and also tried Googling, but had no luck finding a solution. I also believe that in some cases. R converts strings to factors, and I don't want that to happen either, though it doesn't seem to be happening here.

Using data.frame instead of cbind should be helpful

x <- data.frame(col1=c(10, 20), col2=c("[]", "[]"), col3=c("[[1,2]]","[[1,3]]"))
x
  col1 col2    col3
1   10   [] [[1,2]]
2   20   [] [[1,3]]

sapply(x, class) # looking into x to see the class of each element
     col1      col2      col3 
"numeric"  "factor"  "factor" 

As you can see elements from col1 are numeric as you wish.

data.frame can have variables of different class: numeric, factor and character but matrix doesn't, once you put a character element into a matrix all the other will become into this class no matter what clase they were before.