R Converting to date from multiple formats
I need to convert a date string that matches valid dates in multiple formats.
eg.
dates <- c("01-01-2017","02-01-2017","12-01-2016","20160901","20161001", "20161101")
> as.Date(dates, format=c("%m-%d-%Y","%Y%m%d"))
[1] "2017-01-01" NA "2016-12-01" "2016-09-01" NA "2016-11-01"
two dates show that NA
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2 answers
This is pretty much what I wrote the anytime package for:
R> dates <- c("01-01-2017","02-01-2017","12-01-2016","20160901","20161001",
+ "20161101")
R> library(anytime)
R> anydate(dates)
[1] "2017-01-01" "2017-02-01" "2016-12-01" "2016-09-01"
[5] "2016-10-01" "2016-11-01"
R>
Reasonable and without explicit formatting, source, or other line noise.
Speaking of which, a non-starting ISO style with a year requires potential problems, so it 02-03-2017
could be Feb 3rd or March 2nd. I follow the North American convention, which I also find to be somewhat broken - but it is so damn prevalent. Do yourself a favor and try to restrict your data entry to ISO dates, at least in ISO order YYYYMMDD.
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