Base R's default setting for stringsAsFactors within data.frame() and as.data.frame() is supposedly the most often complained about piece of code in the R infrastructure. The hellno package provides an explicit solution without changing R itself or having to mess around with options. It tries to solve this problem by providing alternative data.frame() and as.data.frame() functions that are in fact simple wrappers around base R's data.frame() and as.data.frame() with stringsAsFactors option set to HELLNO ( which in turn equals FALSE ) by default.