[R] converting to date object...

[akshay kulkarni]

Hi Mark,
                 Thanks a lot...

Thanking you,
Yours sincerely,
AKSHAY M KULKARNI
________________________________
From: Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz using me.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2023 8:33 PM
To: akshay kulkarni <akshay_e4 using hotmail.com>; R help Mailing list <r-help using r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R] converting to date object...

Hi,

You do not need to use third party packages for date or date/time objects in R.

If you review ?as.Date, you will see that there are two default formats for Date objects that are specified in the 'tryFormats' argument:

  tryFormats = c("%Y-%m-%d", "%Y/%m/%d")

If your date character vector does not conform to either one, which it does not in this case, then you need to explicitly specify the input format, the details of which are specified in ?strptime.

Thus:

> as.Date("12 APR 2023", format = "%d %b %Y")
[1] "2023-04-12"

> str(as.Date("12 APR 2023", format = "%d %b %Y"))
 Date[1:1], format: "2023-04-12"

> class(as.Date("12 APR 2023", format = "%d %b %Y"))
[1] "Date"

where the %d defines the day of the month number, %b defines the abbreviated month and %Y defines the four digit year. The spaces in between each specifier in the format argument reflect that there are spaces in the source vector, as opposed to hyphens (e.g. 12-APR-2023) or slashes (e.g. 12/APR/2023).

Note that once your vector is a Date class object, you can then manipulate them as dates and perform various operations on them. You can then use format() to alter the output format as you may need for other purposes, in which case, the formatted output is coerced back to a character vector, even though the internal storage is still a Date class object.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz



On April 12, 2023 at 10:34:26 AM, akshay kulkarni (akshay_e4 using hotmail.com (mailto:akshay_e4 using hotmail.com)) wrote:

> dear members,
> I want to convert "12 APR 2023" into a Date object. I tried as_Date() from lubridate, but it is not working:
>
> > as_date("12 APR 2023")
> [1] NA
> Warning message:
> All formats failed to parse. No formats found.
> > as_date("12-APR-2023")
> [1] NA
> Warning message:
> All formats failed to parse. No formats found.
>
> I am looking for a shorthand way of doing it. Of course, one can convert APR to 4 and get the job done, but I ma looking for a short and elegant code
>
> please help...
>
> THanking you,
> Yours sincerely,
> AKSHAY M KULKARNI
>
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>
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