Converting Character Column to Date in R with Lubridate

Question

I have a character column called date that holds data such as "January 15, 2015" I am trying to convert it to ymd format with the as.date function and I also tried the lubridate package. I have tried methods such as:

shootings$Date <- ymd(shootings$Date))

and

shootings$Date <- as.Date(as.character(shootings$Date))

I Would like it to look like 2013-01-01 (ymd) if possible. but I keep getting a parsing issue or the data just goes in N/A. Any help would be appreciated

`as.Date("January 15, 2015",format="%B %d, %Y")` see `?as.Date `and `?strptime` for help — digEmAll, Nov 07 '18 at 13:10
Related post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4310326/convert-character-to-date-in-r — zx8754, Nov 07 '18 at 13:16

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 07 '18 at 13:10

11

What you want is

mdy("January 15, 2015")
# [1] "2015-01-15"

The problem is that the function name has to correspond to your input format (mdy), not the desired output (ymd).

answered Nov 07 '18 at 13:10

Julius Vainora

47,421
9
90
102

Great Thank you! it also gave me a good understanding of the code – Daniel Murran Nov 07 '18 at 13:47
@JuliusVainora Thanks for this! I tried this on my data with the format "12/18/1996 0:00:00" using ```mdy_hms()``` as that's my input format but my column was turned into all NAs. Can you help clarify as to why that is happening? I appreciate you taking the time! – Salma Abdel-Raheem May 24 '21 at 03:18

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 07 '18 at 13:11

5

Using anytime:

# example data
x <- "January 15, 2015"

library(anytime)

anydate(x)
# [1] "2015-01-15"

answered Nov 07 '18 at 13:11

zx8754

52,746
12
114
209

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 04 '21 at 05:31

1

We can solve this with the lubridate library

library(lubridate)

shootings %>% mdy(January 15, 2015)

output - 2015-01-15

edited Oct 04 '21 at 05:31

David Buck

3,752
35
31
35

answered Oct 04 '21 at 00:24

DataEnthu

11
1

Converting Character Column to Date in R with Lubridate

3 Answers3