CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstringdatetypes
Djutejlit_qr
Djutejlit_qr

Reputation: 3

How do I change dates to strings in R?

I have a massive column of dates with time. I want to change it to “BP” for before pandemic and “AP” for after pandemic depending on the date. Any date after 2020-04-20 would be AP and anything before is BP.

I tried using gsub to change it and the ifelse function but that did not work.

The format of the date is yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss. The type is double.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 42

Answers (1)

Jon Spring
Jon Spring

Reputation: 66775

my_data <- data.frame(
  date = as.POSIXct(c(
  "2020-04-01 12:34:56",
  "2020-04-21 01:23:45"))
)
my_data
#>                  date
#> 1 2020-04-01 12:34:56
#> 2 2020-04-21 01:23:45

# create a new variable called pandemic
my_data$pandemic = ifelse(my_data$date >= as.POSIXct("2020-04-20 00:00:00"),
                          "AP",
                          "BP")
my_data
#>                  date pandemic
#> 1 2020-04-01 12:34:56       BP
#> 2 2020-04-21 01:23:45       AP

Or if you really want to overwrite the date column and change to a character type, use:

my_data$date = ifelse(my_data$date >= as.POSIXct("2020-04-20 00:00:00"),
                     "AP", "BP")
my_data
#>   date
#> 1   BP
#> 2   AP

Upvotes: 1

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