[R] question about formatting Dates

[R. Michael Weylandt]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:54 PM, Erin Hodgess <erinm.hodgess at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear R People:
>
> I have dates as factors in the following:
>
>> poudel.df$DATE
> [1] 1/2/2011  1/4/2011  1/4/2011  1/4/2011  1/6/2011  1/7/2011  1/8/2011
> [8] 1/9/2011  1/10/2011
> Levels: 1/10/2011 1/2/2011 1/4/2011 1/6/2011 1/7/2011 1/8/2011 1/9/2011
>>
>
> I want them to be "regular" dates which can be sorted, etc.
>
> But when I did this:
>
>> as.character(poudel.df$DATE)
> [1] "1/2/2011"  "1/4/2011"  "1/4/2011"  "1/4/2011"  "1/6/2011"  "1/7/2011"
> [7] "1/8/2011"  "1/9/2011"  "1/10/2011"
>
> and
>> as.Date(as.character(poudel.df$DATE),"%m/%d/$Y")

Right about ...........
         ^

should be a percent instead of a dollar sign.

Also, probably can't hurt to used a named argument (but I don't think
that's the problem here)

In the future dput()-ery would be much appreciated.

Michael

> [1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
>
> because the dates do not have leading zeros.
>
> There are approximately 30 years of nearly daily data in the entire set.
>
> Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
>
> Sincerely,
> Erin
>
>
> --
> Erin Hodgess
> Associate Professor
> Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences
> University of Houston - Downtown
> mailto: erinm.hodgess at gmail.com
>
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