CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdateformat
Nacho
Nacho

Reputation: 51

R difference between dates with different formats

What I'm trying to do is to calculate the total days between two dates. If the dates are in "yyyy/mm/dd" format I did it this way:

EndDate <- "2012/02/01"
StartDate <- "1900/01/01"
DiffBewtweenDates <- data.frame(date=c(EndDate),start=c(StartDate))
DiffBewtweenDates$date_diff <- as.Date(as.character(DiffBewtweenDates$date), format="%Y/%m/%d")- 
as.Date(as.character(DiffBewtweenDates$start), format="%Y/%m/%d")
DiffBewtweenDates

And it worked. But I'm requested to get at least the EndDate in this format "FullDayName, DayNumber of FullMonthName of FullYearNumber". Something like this "Sunday, 1 of February of 2012".

As I understand by the R Manual, it would be ...format="%A, %d of %B of %Y" But it doesn't work and I can't figure out why.

Thanks in advance for any idea.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 144

Answers (2)

inscaven
inscaven

Reputation: 2584

Simply to calculate difference in days and get desired output you can do

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C") 
EndDate <- as.Date("2012/02/01", format = "%Y/%m/%d")
StartDate <- as.Date("1900/01/01", format = "%Y/%m/%d")

EndDate - StartDate            
# Time difference of 40938 days

format(EndDate, "%A, %d of %B of %Y")
# [1] "Wednesday, 01 of February of 2012"

Upvotes: 1

lukeA
lukeA

Reputation: 54237

Perhaps you got to change your locale to english: 

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "english")
date <- "Sunday, 1 of February of 2012"
lubridate::guess_formats(date, orders = "dmy")
#                 dmy 
# "%A, %d of %B of %Y"

as.Date(date, guess_formats(date, orders = "dmy"))
# [1] "2012-02-01"

Anyway, you can use lubridate's guess_formats function to guess the formats for many date strings.

Upvotes: 1

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