[R] formatting date strings

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Jason Turner wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 03:47:01PM +1100, Jeremy.Whish at csiro.au wrote:
> ...
> > I have a simulation model that out puts dates in a standard dd/mm/yy format
> > R reads this as a factor
>
> Step 1 - you need to read it as plain dumb text first.
> In help(read.table), check out the "as.is" option.  You probably want
> as.is=TRUE

Please check out argument colClasses.  You want colClasses = "character'
for that column.

as.is is very confusing: it was for a long time incorrectly documented
which did not reduce the confusion.  I would like to deprecate it.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._