[R] read.table behavior for Dates.

[Henrique Dallazuanna]

Try this:

patt <- "\\d{4}[-/]\\d{2}[-/]\\d{2}" # could be
\\d{2}[-/]\\d{2}[-/]\\d{4}, etc...

idx <- colSums(sapply(myData, regexpr, pattern = patt)) > 0
myData[idx] <- lapply(myData[idx], as.Date)

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Jeroen Ooms <jeroenooms at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes I know I can manually do it, but I am using it for scripts in which users
> upload files. Hence, I don't know what's going to come; I don't know on
> before hand whether data will contain Dates, and in which columns they
> appear. This is why I was surprised that read.table has some (undocumented)
> behavior of converting columns that look like Dates to a different format.
>
> I would like to control this default behavior of the read.table function,
> rather than set a type for a specific column of a specific file.
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/read-table-behavior-for-Dates-tp2013442p2013489.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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>



-- 
Henrique Dallazuanna
Curitiba-Paraná-Brasil
25° 25' 40" S 49° 16' 22" O