[R] Default Format for Dates?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 6/10/05, khobson at fd9ns01.okladot.state.ok.us
<khobson at fd9ns01.okladot.state.ok.us> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Is there anyway to preset date formats?  I have a date from a cover.dbf
> that is shown as this:
> > cover$FINALREPOR
> [1] "2003-06-24"
> 
> The numeric value in cover$FINALREPOR is 12227.  I'd rather not create
> another vector to hold the properly formatted date.
> 
> When I put this in a WordPerfect merge, I want the date to be June 24,
> 2003.   I could take care of the problem in a WordPerfect macro but I'd
> rather do it as an R default date format if possible.
> 

I am not entirely sure I understand what you are asking but I assume
you want a Date variable such that print, format and as.character,
when applied to it, produce default output of a prespecified format.

Although I do not think Date will do that, chron can
associate a default format with a chron variable.

library(chron)

# custom format for a dates (i.e. chron) object 
my.format <- function(x) format(as.Date(dates(x)), "%B %d %Y")

# test data
my.Date <- Sys.Date() + 0:9

# convert to chron and associate my.format to it
my.chron <- chron(unclass(my.Date), out.format = my.format)

print(my.chron)
my.chron
as.character(my.chron)
format(my.chron)

Note that you can find more information on chron and various
conversions in my article in RNews 4/1 and especially the table 
at the end of that article.