[R] Compiling date

Dr Eberhard W Lisse el at lisse.na
Tue Sep 9 20:07:49 CEST 2008


Is this Month-Day or Day-Month or a mixture of both?

I still think using the Format -> Cell -> Date will work
much better...

el


On 09 Sep 2008, at 11:21 , David Scott wrote:

> On Mon, 8 Sep 2008, Megh Dal wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have following kind of dataset (all are dates) in my Excel sheet.
>>
>> 09/08/08
>> 09/05/08
>> 09/04/08
>> 09/02/08
>> 09/01/08
>> 29/08/2008
>> 28/08/2008
>> 27/08/2008
>> 26/08/2008
>> 25/08/2008
>> 22/08/2008
>> 21/08/2008
>> 20/08/2008
>> 18/08/2008
>> 14/08/2008
>> 13/08/2008
>> 08/12/08
>> 08/11/08
>> 08/08/08
>> 08/07/08
>>
>> However I want to use R to compile those data to make all dates in  
>> same format. Can anyone please tell me any automated way for doing  
>> that?
>>
>
> Well you have to read them in as character first. Then use sub to  
> make the two digit years into four digits. The following could  
> probably be improved by a regular expression whiz, but works:
>
>> strngs <- c("06/05/08","23/11/2008")
>> sub("([0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]/)([0-9][0-9]$)","\\120\\2",strngs)
> [1] "06/05/2008" "23/11/2008"
>
>
> David Scott



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