How to Transform a Factor Variable into a Date
A couple thoughts:
1. converting factors into dates often requires that they be converted to
character first.
2. you don't really have dates; you have just months and years
3. therefore perhaps the as.yearmon() function in the zoo package could help
library(zoo)
my.factor <- factor("Feb 2017")
as.yearmon(my.factor) ## gets around the factor-vs-character issue
On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 3:07 PM, Paul Bernal <paulbernal07 at gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
Hope you are doing great. I have a .csv file that I read into R, the .csv
file consistss of two fields (TransitDate and CargoTons).
The TransitDate I formatted from Excel in the fashion mmm-yy (e.g.:
Apr-2013). However R does not recognize the field TransitDate as a date
field.
Here is the code:
library(lubridate)
Dataset <- read.table("U:/NEWCargoData.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",",
na.strings="NA", dec=".", strip.white=TRUE)
DatasetFrame <- data.frame(Dataset)
DatasetFrame$TransitDate <- as.Date(DatasetFrame$TransitDate, format =
"%b-%y")
Now, when I do DatasetFrame[1,1], the following happens:
DatasetFrame[1,1]
[1] NA
DatasetFrame[2,1]
[1] NA
Now when I do:
Dataset[1,1] #this is the dataset as was read from my computer
[1] Jun-11 62 Levels: Apr-13 Apr-14 Apr-15 Apr-16 Apr-17 Aug-13 Aug-14 Aug-15 Aug-16 Dec-12 Dec-13 Dec-14 ... Sep-16
I am also attaching the .csv file for your reference. How can I do to get R to convert TransitDate into an actual date field? R is not recognizing it as a date. Any help will be greatly appreciated, Best regards, Paul
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/ posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.