[R] colClasses = "Date" in read.delim, how to pass date-format?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You are confusing class "Date" (part of R) with class "dates" (part of 
package chron).  There is no as() method for class "dates", so you can't 
do this.  You can read the column as character (not factor) and convert 
later, but it sounds like the `huge amount of memory (and time)' is in 
fact taken by package chron.

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Christoph Lehmann wrote:

> I have a huge data-set with one column being of type date.
> Of course I can import the data using this column as "factor" and then 
> convert it later to dates, using:
>
> sws.bezuege$FaktDat <- dates(as.character(sws.bezuege$FaktDat),
>                             format = c(dates = "d.m.y"))
>
>
> But the conversion requires a huge amount of memory (and time), therefore I 
> would like to use colClasses = c("Date"). My question is:
> since I have format  = c(dates = "d.m.y"), how can I pass this option to 
> read.delim(..., colClasses = c("Date")) ?

-- 
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)
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