R Read abbreviated month form a date that is not in English

Question

I have a text file that includes dates, and want to convert it to a datatable.

Converting the dates such as 03-FEB-2011 can be done with

data$fecha &         


        

Answer 1

If you can't add locales to your OS,

> Sys.setlocale(locale = "es")
[1] ""
Warning message:
In Sys.setlocale(locale = "es") :
OS reports request to set locale to "es" cannot be honored

the package readr() has ways to specify and even create locales:

> library(readr) 
> parse_date("31 DICIEMBRE 2011","%d %B %Y",locale=locale("es"))
[1] "2011-12-31"