Convert dd/mm/yy and dd/mm/yyyy to Dates

Question

I have some a character vector with dates in various formats like this

dates <- c(\"23/11/12\", \"20/10/2012\", \"22/10/2012\" ,\"23/11/12\")

Answer 1

You can use parse_date_time from lubridate:

some.dates <- c("23/11/12", "20/10/2012", "22/10/2012" ,"23/11/12")
parse_date_time(some.dates,c('dmy'))
[1] "2012-11-23 UTC" "2012-10-20 UTC" "2012-10-22 UTC" "2012-11-23 UTC"

But , Note that the order of format is important :

some.dates <- c("20/10/2012","23/11/12",  "22/10/2012" ,"23/11/12")
parse_date_time(some.dates,c('dmY','dmy'))

[1] "2012-10-20 UTC" "2012-11-23 UTC" "2012-10-22 UTC" "2012-11-23 UTC"

EDIT

Internally parse_date_time is using guess_formats (which I guess uses some regular expressions):

guess_formats(some.dates,c('dmy'))
       dmy        dmy        dmy        dmy 
"%d/%m/%Y" "%d/%m/%y" "%d/%m/%Y" "%d/%m/%y" 

As mentioned in the comment you can use parse_date_time like this:

as.Date(dates, format = guess_formats(dates,c('dmy')))