[R] Compiling date

[Megh Dal]

It is a mixture of both. The data is so notorious excel cant format properly. Therefore I thought whether R can do something otherwise I have to do manually.


--- On Tue, 9/9/08, Dr Eberhard W Lisse <el at lisse.na> wrote:

> From: Dr Eberhard W Lisse <el at lisse.na>
> Subject: Re: [R] Compiling date
> To: "David Scott" <d.scott at auckland.ac.nz>
> Cc: "Dr Eberhard W Lisse" <el at lisse.na>, "Megh Dal" <megh700004 at yahoo.com>, r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 11:37 PM
> Is this Month-Day or Day-Month or a mixture of both?
> 
> I still think using the Format -> Cell -> Date will
> work
> much better...
> 
> el
> 
> 
> On 09 Sep 2008, at 11:21 , David Scott wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 8 Sep 2008, Megh Dal wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I have following kind of dataset (all are dates)
> in my Excel sheet.
> >>
> >> 09/08/08
> >> 09/05/08
> >> 09/04/08
> >> 09/02/08
> >> 09/01/08
> >> 29/08/2008
> >> 28/08/2008
> >> 27/08/2008
> >> 26/08/2008
> >> 25/08/2008
> >> 22/08/2008
> >> 21/08/2008
> >> 20/08/2008
> >> 18/08/2008
> >> 14/08/2008
> >> 13/08/2008
> >> 08/12/08
> >> 08/11/08
> >> 08/08/08
> >> 08/07/08
> >>
> >> However I want to use R to compile those data to
> make all dates in  
> >> same format. Can anyone please tell me any
> automated way for doing  
> >> that?
> >>
> >
> > Well you have to read them in as character first. Then
> use sub to  
> > make the two digit years into four digits. The
> following could  
> > probably be improved by a regular expression whiz, but
> works:
> >
> >> strngs <-
> c("06/05/08","23/11/2008")
> >>
> sub("([0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]/)([0-9][0-9]$)","\\120\\2",strngs)
> > [1] "06/05/2008" "23/11/2008"
> >
> >
> > David Scott