Formatting a date in R without leading zeros

Question

Is there a way to use the format function on a date object, specifically an object of class POSIXlt, POSIXct, or Date, wi

Answer 1

You can do this with a simple change to your strftime format string. However, it depends on your platform (Unix or Windows).

Unix

Insert a minus sign (-) before each term you'd like to remove leading zeros from:

format(as.Date("2020-06-02"), "%Y, %-m, %-d")
[1] "2020, 6, 2"

Windows

Insert a pound sign (#) before each desired term:

format(as.Date("2020-06-02"), "%Y, %#m, %#d")
[1] "2020, 6, 2"

Answer 2

A more general solution using gsub, to remove leading zeros from the day or month digits produced by %m or %d. This deletes any zero that is not preceded by a digit:

gsub("(\\D)0", "\\1", format(as.Date("1998-09-02"), "%Y, %m, %d"))

Answer 3

I have discovered a workaround by using year, month and day function of lubridate package. With the help of glue::glue, it is easy to do it as following:

require(lubridate)
require(glue)
dt <- "1998-09-02"
glue("{year(dt)}, {month(dt)}, {day(dt)}")
# 1998, 9, 2

Answer 4

Just remove the leading zeros at the end:

gsub(" 0", " ", format(as.Date("1998-09-02"), "%Y, %m, %d"))
## [1] "1998, 9, 2"

Use %e to obtain a leading space instead of a leading zero.