Convert character to Date in R

Question

I am relatively new to R, but this is the first time I have had to deal with date conversions. I read in my data from a CSV (using read.table()), but I shorted the data to highlight my issue. When read into R, the Date field is character.

Simply, most of my dates get coerced correctly, except for a few instances. The example below will hopefully show you what is going on.

# my attempt to coerce the date -- uses the stringr package
prods.all$Date2 <- as.Date(str_sub(prods.all$Date, 1, 
                str_locate(prods.all$Date, " ")[1]-1), 
                "%m/%d/%Y")

# grab two rows to highlight my issue
temp <- prods.all[c(1925:1926), c(1,8)]

> temp
                   Date      Date2
1925  10/9/2009 0:00:00 2009-10-09
1926 10/15/2009 0:00:00 0200-10-15

As you can see, the year of some of the dates is inaccurate. The pattern seems to occur when the day is double digit.

I have looked through a couple of books and tried to Google a better way, but everything seems to suggest that my data are not formatted correctly on input.

Given how powerful R is, I figure that there is a very easy way to force my column to be valid dates and that I am overlooking a very obvious solution.

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You may be overcomplicating things, is there any reason you need the stringr package?

 df <- data.frame(Date = c("10/9/2009 0:00:00", "10/15/2009 0:00:00"))
 as.Date(df$Date, "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")

[1] "2009-10-09" "2009-10-15"

More generally and if you need the time component as well, use strptime:

strptime(df$Date, "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")

I'm guessing at what your actual data might look at from the partial results you give.

Answer 2

The easiest way is to use lubridate:

library(lubridate)
prods.all$Date2 <- mdy(prods.all$Date2)

This function automatically returns objects of class POSIXct and will work with either factors or characters.

Answer 3

library(lubridate) if your date format is like this '04/24/2017 05:35:00'then change it like below prods.all$Date2<-gsub("/","-",prods.all$Date2) then change the date format parse_date_time(prods.all$Date2, orders="mdy hms")