[R] dates() is a great date function in R

[Gavin Simpson]

On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 12:14 -0700, Mr Natural wrote: 
> Proper calendar dates in R are great for plotting and calculating. 
> However for the non-wonks among us, they can be very frustrating.
> I have recently discussed the pains that people in my lab have had 
> with dates in R. Especially the frustration of bringing date data into R 
> from Excel, which we have to do a lot. 

I've always found the following reasonably intuitive:

Given the csv file that I've pasted in below, the following reads the
csv file in, formats the dates and class Date and then draws a plot.

I have dates in DD/MM/YYYY format so year is not first - thus attesting
to R not hating dates in this format ;-)

## read in csv data
## as.is = TRUE stops characters being converted to factors
## thus saving us an extra step to convert them back
dat <- read.csv("date_data.csv", as.is = TRUE)

## we convert to class Date
## format tells R how the dates are formatted in our character strings
## see ?strftime for the meaning and available codes
dat$Date <- as.Date(dat$Date, format = "%d/%m/%Y")

## check this worked ok
str(dat$Date)
dat$Date

## see nicely formatted dates and not a drop of R-related hatred 
## but just about the most boring graph I could come up with
plot(Data ~ Date, dat, type = "l")

And you can keep your Excel file formatted as dates as well - bonus!

Oh, and before you get "Martin'd", it is the chron *package*!

HTH

G

CSV file I used, generated in OpenOffice.org, but I presume it stores
Dates in the same way as Excel?:

"Data","Date"
1,01/01/2007
2,02/01/2007
3,03/01/2007
4,04/01/2007
5,05/01/2007
6,06/01/2007
7,07/01/2007
8,08/01/2007
9,09/01/2007
10,10/01/2007
11,11/01/2007
10,12/01/2007
9,13/01/2007
8,14/01/2007
7,15/01/2007
6,16/01/2007
5,17/01/2007
4,18/01/2007
3,19/01/2007
2,20/01/2007
1,21/01/2007
1,22/01/2007
2,23/01/2007
3,24/01/2007

> Please find below a simple analgesic for R date importation that I
> discovered 
> over the last 1.5 days (Learning new stuff in R is calculated in 1/2 days).
> 
> The function    dates()    gives the simplest way to get calendar dates into
> R from Excel that I can find.
> But straight importation of Excel dates, via a csv or txt file, can be a a
> huge pain (I'll give details for anyone who cares to know). 
> 
> My pain killer is:
> Consider that you have Excel columns in month, day, year format. Note that R
> hates date data that does not lead with the year. 
> 
> a. Load the chron library by typing   library(chron)   in the console.
> You know that you need this library from information revealed by 
> performing the query,
> ?dates()"    in the Console window. This gives the R documentation 
> help file for this and related time, date functions.  In the upper left 
> of the documentation, one sees "dates(chron)". This tells you that you
> need the library chron. 
> 
> b. Change the format "dates" in Excel to format "general", which gives 
> 5 digit Julian dates. Import the csv file (I use    read.csv()  with the 
> Julian dates and other data of interest.
> 
> c.  Now, change the Julian dates that came in with the csv file into 
> calendar dates with the    dates() function. Below is my code for performing 
> this activity, concerning an R data file called ss,
> 
> ss holds the Julian dates, illustrated below from the column MPdate,
> 
> >ss$MPdate[1:5]
> [1] 34252 34425 34547 34759 34773
> 
> The dates() function makes calendar dates from Julian dates,
> 
> >dmp<-dates(ss$MPdate,origin=c(month = 1, day = 1, year = 1900))
> 
> > dmp[1:5]
> [1] 10/12/93 04/03/94 08/03/94 03/03/95 03/17/95
> 
> I would appreciate the comments of more sophisticated programmers who
> can suggest streamlining or shortcutting this operation.
> 
> regards, Don
> 
> 
> 
>  
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