Assigning categorical values to dates

I am not averse to a factor-based solution, but I would still have to
manually enter that factor each month, correct? If possible, I?d just like
to point R at that column and have it do the work.

?
Nathan Parsons, B.SC, M.Sc, G.C.

Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Sociology, Portland State University
Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Washington State University
Graduate Advocate, American Association of University Professors (OR)

Recent work (
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nathan_Parsons3/publications)
Schedule an appointment (https://calendly.com/nate-parsons)

On Wednesday, Jul 21, 2021 at 8:30 PM, Tom Woolman <

twoolman at ontargettek.com (mailto:twoolman at ontargettek.com)> wrote:

Couldn't you convert the date columns to character type data in a data
frame, and then convert those strings to factors in a 2nd step?

The only downside I think to treating dates as factor levels is that
you might have an awful lot of factors if you have a large enough
dataset.



Quoting "N. F. Parsons" <nathan.f.parsons at gmail.com>:

Hi all,

If I have a tibble as follows:

tibble(dates = c(rep("2021-07-04", 2), rep("2021-07-25", 3),
rep("2021-07-18", 4)))

how in the world do I add a column that evaluates each of those dates

and

assigns it a categorical value such that

dates cycle
<chr> <chr>
2021-07-04 1
2021-07-04 1
2021-07-25 3
2021-07-25 3
2021-07-25 3
2021-07-18 2
2021-07-18 2
2021-07-18 2
2021-07-18 2

Not to further complicate matters, but some months I may only have one
date, and some months I will have 4 dates - so thats not a fixed

quantity.

We've literally been doing this by hand at my job and I'd like to

automate

it.

Thanks in advance!

Nate Parsons

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