convert string date to R Date FAST for all dates

Question

This has been asked several times with no clear answer: I would like to convert an R character string of the form \"YYYY-mm-dd\" into a Date. The as.Date<

Answer 1

The function parse_date_time from the 'lubridate' package is quite fast too:

library(date)
library(lubridate)
set.seed(21)
x <- as.character(Sys.Date()-sample(40000, 1e6, TRUE))
system.time(date1 <- as.Date(x))
#  user  system elapsed 
# 12.86    0.00   12.94 
system.time(date2 <- as.Date(as.date(x,"ymd"))) # from package 'date'
#  user  system elapsed 
#  4.82    0.00    4.85 
system.time(date3 <- as.Date(parse_date_time(x,'%y-%m-%d'))) # from package 'lubridate'
#  user  system elapsed 
#  0.27    0.00    0.26 
all(date1 == date2)
#  TRUE
all(date1 == date3)
#  TRUE