[R] read "4-jan-02" as date

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, bogdan romocea wrote:

> Dear R users,
> 
> I have a column with dates (character) in a data frame:
> 12-Jan-01 11-Jan-01 10-Jan-01 9-Jan-01  8-Jan-01  5-Jan-01
> and I need to convert them to (Julian) dates so that I can
> sort the whole data frame by date. I thought it would be
> very simple, but after checking the documentation and the
> list I still don't have something that works.
> 
> 1. as.Date returns the error below. What am I doing wrong?
> As far as I can see the character strings are in standard
> format.
> d$Date <- as.Date(d$Date, format="%d-%b-%y")
> Error in fromchar(x) : character string is not in a
> standard unambiguous format

I get:

> x <- scan(what="")
1: 12-Jan-01 11-Jan-01 10-Jan-01 9-Jan-01  8-Jan-01  5-Jan-01
7:
Read 6 items
> as.Date(x, format="%d-%b-%y")
[1] "2001-01-12" "2001-01-11" "2001-01-10" "2001-01-09" "2001-01-08"
[6] "2001-01-05"

Are you in an English-speaking domain?  Try running in the C locale
(?Sys.setlocale).

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595