date functions in R return wrong year

Question

I am trying to convert a character field into a date field for which the options are to either use strptime function or as.Date function. Here is two r

Answer 1

I would highly recommend lubridate for date conversions

library(lubridate)

mdy("5/13/2015")

# [1] "2015-05-13"

Answer 2

Your date format string should use a capital "Y", which captures the full date with century, such as "2015". Lowercase "y" is used to capture the year in two digits, as when "2015" is written in shorthand as "15". In your original cases, the strptime and as.Date functions incorrectly interpret the "20" in "2015" as the 2-digit year. The corrected version:

strptime(c("5/13/2015"),"%m/%d/%Y")

"2015-05-13 EDT"