Proper calendar dates in R are great for plotting and calculating.
However for the non-wonks among us, they can be very frustrating.
I have recently discussed the pains that people in my lab have had
with dates in R. Especially the frustration of bringing date data into R
from Excel, which we have to do a lot.
Please find below a simple analgesic for R date importation that I
discovered
over the last 1.5 days (Learning new stuff in R is calculated in 1/2 days).
The function dates() gives the simplest way to get calendar dates into
R from Excel that I can find.
But straight importation of Excel dates, via a csv or txt file, can be a a
huge pain (I'll give details for anyone who cares to know).
My pain killer is:
Consider that you have Excel columns in month, day, year format. Note that R
hates date data that does not lead with the year.
a. Load the chron library by typing library(chron) in the console.
You know that you need this library from information revealed by
performing the query,
?dates()" in the Console window. This gives the R documentation
help file for this and related time, date functions. In the upper left
of the documentation, one sees "dates(chron)". This tells you that you
need the library chron.
b. Change the format "dates" in Excel to format "general", which gives
5 digit Julian dates. Import the csv file (I use read.csv() with the
Julian dates and other data of interest.
c. Now, change the Julian dates that came in with the csv file into
calendar dates with the dates() function. Below is my code for performing
this activity, concerning an R data file called ss,
ss holds the Julian dates, illustrated below from the column MPdate,
[1] 34252 34425 34547 34759 34773
The dates() function makes calendar dates from Julian dates,
dmp<-dates(ss$MPdate,origin=c(month = 1, day = 1, year = 1900))