how to convert the weekdays to a factor in R

Question

I have a data frame like this:

date          count   wd
2012-10-01        0  Monday
2012-10-02        5  Tuesday
2012-10-06       10  Saturday
2012-10-07       15  Sunday

I use

dat <- mutate(dat,wd = weekdays(as.Date(dat$date)))

to add a new array "wd" , however, I'd like to add a new factor array to show if this day is a weekday or weekend, something like:

date          count   wd
2012-10-01        0  weekday
2012-10-02        5  weekday
2012-10-06       10  weekend
2012-10-07       15  weekend

Is any simple way to do that? Thanks

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

ifelse is that standard way to check a condition on each element of a vector and do something based on the check. Since you already have the named weekdays, you have a pretty trivial condition to check:

dat$we = ifelse(dat$wd %in% c("Saturday", "Sunday"), "weekend", "weekday")

This adds a new variable, we, to your data. It will be a factor by default when added to the data frame with $<-.

You can, of course, use ifelse() inside mutate (or use dplyr::if_else), in which case you would need to wrap the result in factor() to coerce it to a factor - it will be a character by otherwise.

For other methods of checking weekendness that don't depend on already having the names of the days of the week see How to check if a date is a weekend?.

how to convert the weekdays to a factor in R

1 Answers1