How do I convert a factor into date format

Question

I imported a CSV file with dates from a SQL query  but the dates are really date-time values and R doesn t seem to recognize them as dates   gt  mydate  1  1 15 2006 0 00 00 2373 Levels  1 1 2006 0 00 00 1 1 2007 0 00 00 1 1 2008 0 00 00     9 9 2012 0 00 00  gt  class mydate   1   quot factor quot   gt  as Date mydate  Error in charToDate x       character string is not in a standard unambiguous format  How do I convert mydate to date format   I don t need to include the time portion

User · Accepted Answer

You were close   format  needs to be added to the as Date call   mydate  lt - factor  1 15 2006 0 00 00   as Date mydate  format     m  d  Y       1   2006-01-15

User · Answer

Take a look at the formats in  strptime  R gt  foo  lt -  factor  1 15 2006 0 00 00   R gt  foo  lt - as Date foo  format     m  d  Y  H  M  S                                              R gt  foo                                                                                          1   2006-01-15                                                                               R gt  class foo                                                                                    1   Date      Note that this will work even if foo starts out as a character  It will also work if using other date formats  as POSIXlt  as POSIXct

User · Answer

You can try lubridate package which makes life much easier  library lubridate   mdy hms mydate    The above will change the date format to POSIXct  A sample working example    gt  data  lt -  1 15 2006 01 15 00   gt  library lubridate   gt  mydate  lt - mdy hms data   gt  mydate  1   2006-01-15 01 15 00 UTC   gt  class mydate   1   POSIXct   POSIXt     For case with factor use as character  data  lt - factor  1 15 2006 01 15 00   library lubridate  mydate  lt - mdy hms as character data

[r] How do I convert a factor into date format?

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