How do I subset my data.frame by field type (e.g., numeric, character)?

Question

I'd like to be able to subset my data.frame, DATA, into numeric fields and factor-type fields. My goal is to write generalized scripts to summarize my data, however, certain functions, such as hist or quantile, are not appropriate for non-numeric data. And it would make more sense to run table on the factor-type fields.

I tried using

types <- apply( DATA, 2, typeof)

to create a list of types for each field which I could then subset DATA by. However, this only caused errors. I'm sure there is a simply way of doing this but I've done a lot of searching and can't come up with anything.

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Since it worked, I'm posting my comment as an answer to this:]

Try lapply(DATA,class)