Converting character(13-Dec-2012) to date in R

Question

I am working on a dataset. Variable date has the character type data in this format"13-Dec-2012". I need to convert this character into date format. I tried some ways but couldn't figure it out. Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

We can use the lubridate package. dmy means day-month-year.

library(lubridate)

dmy("13-Dec-2012")
# [1] "2012-12-13"

Or use the base R. See this link to learn more about the format of date specification (https://www.statmethods.net/input/dates.html).

as.Date("13-Dec-2012", format = "%d-%b-%Y")
# [1] "2012-12-13"

Or use the anydate function from the anytime package.

library(anytime)

anydate("13-Dec-2012")
# [1] "2012-12-13"