[R] read.table behavior for Dates.

[Kjetil Halvorsen]

use the argument   colClasses of read.table

Kjetil

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Jeroen Ooms <jeroenooms at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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>
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