[R] read.table behavior for Dates.

[Jeroen Ooms]

When read.table imports a table that includes a header called 'Date', it
tries to recognize the date format. For example, if one imports this data
from Yahoo finance, the Date column is automatically transformed to Y-m-d,
whereis in the data it appears as m/d/Y:

myData <-
read.csv("http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=GOOG&a=07&b=19&c=2004&d=03&e=16&f=2010&g=d&ignore=.csv")

However, it does not actually convert the variable to Date format.
MyData$Date is still a factor. This combination of converting the format but
not attributing the 'Date' class is for me extremely unfortunate behavior.
My scripts still don't recognize the variable as being a date, but it also
becomes harder to manually convert it using as.Date() because it is no
longer in the original format.

Is there a way to either automatically convert to as.Date() when a date
format has been detected, or otherwise disable this transformation at all?


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