CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdateformatting
S.Nieves
S.Nieves

Reputation: 23

Formatting Unconventional Date

I'm having trouble formatting a list of dates in R. The conventional methods of formatting in R such as as.Date or as.POSIXct don't seem to be working.

I have dates in the format: 1012015

using 

as.POSIXct(as.character(data$Start_Date), format = "%m%d%Y")

does not give me an error, but my date returns

"0015-10-12" because the month is not a two digit number.

Is there a way to change this into the correct date format?F

Upvotes: 0

Views: 120

Answers (2)

G. Grothendieck
G. Grothendieck

Reputation: 269852

This uses only base R. The %08d specifies a number to be formatted into 8 characters with 0 fill giving in this case "01012015".

as.POSIXct(sprintf("%08d", 1012015), format = "%m%d%Y")
## [1] "2015-01-01 EST"

Note that if you don't have any hours/minutes/seconds it would be less error prone to use "Date" class since then the possibility of subtle time zone errors is eliminated.

as.Date(sprintf("%08d", 1012015), format = "%m%d%Y")
## [1] "2015-01-01"

Upvotes: 0

Uwe
Uwe

Reputation: 42564

The lubridate package can help with this:

lubridate::mdy(1012015)

[1] "2015-01-01"

The format looks ambiguous but the OP gave two hints:

  • He is using format = "%m%d%Y" in his own attempt, and
  • he argues the issue is because the month is not a two digit number

Upvotes: 3

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