CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rlubridate
Ali Inayat
Ali Inayat

Reputation: 77

How to convert my character vector ( January 2012) to date vector in R

This may seem to be pretty easy but I dont know where I'm going wrong. I have a character vector with dates of form "January 2012", "March 2012" and so on. I have tried a few different codes but none of them seems to work and returns NA values.

Code1:

as.POSIXct(df$date, format = "%Y %B")

returns NA vales

Code2:

as_date(df$date, format= NULL)

returns NA values and the warning message:

Warning message:
All formats failed to parse. No formats found.

Code3:

as.Date(df$date, "%Y %B")

returns NA values and the warning message:

Warning message:
In strptime(x, format, tz = "GMT") : unknown timezone 'PLT-3PLT'

Upvotes: 1

Views: 246

Answers (1)

Allan Cameron
Allan Cameron

Reputation: 173813

A date needs to include the day of the month. Typically in dealing with month-only data, we would use the first of the month. The solution is therefore to paste a 1 to the front of each string and use the format "%d %Y %B" as shown in this reproducible example:

df <- data.frame(date = c('2022 January', '2022 March'))

as.POSIXct(paste(1, df$date), format = "%d %Y %B")
#> [1] "2022-01-01 GMT" "2022-03-01 GMT"

Created on 2022-09-29 with reprex v2.0.2

Upvotes: 3

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