How to transform the date format as "20050425"
On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 15:18 -0500, Yong Wang wrote:
Dear R user, if the dates are in format as "20050425" i.e., Apr. 25 2004" can you suggest an easy way to transfom it to standard form as "2005-04-25" or "2004Apr25" or "2005/04/25" or any other format which is R recognizable? if there is no easy way to do that, can you let me know what is the function in R performing similiar function as the "string" function in C or some other more basic language, so I can loop through all dates to make the desired change. thank you regards
If you are just formatting the Date (ie. no time component) then look at ?as.Date, which has a format argument:
as.Date("20050425", "%Y%M%d")
[1] "2005-04-25" Using the format argument, you then return a standard Date class object for use in R. The format argument varies as required for your data format. On the output side, there is the format() function, which has a method for Dates, that you can then use to convert the Date class object into a character vector:
MyDate <- as.Date("20050425", "%Y%M%d")
MyDate
[1] "2005-04-25"
format(MyDate, "%B %d %Y")
[1] "April 25 2005" Also see ?strftime for details on date format strings. HTH, Marc Schwartz