[R] importing date vector with read.table

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2010, Jack Johnson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I understand this should be an easy task but I am still struggling a bit to
> read a .txt file with a date vector. My code is as below:
>
>
> data<-read.table(file.choose(),header=TRUE,sep="\t",dec=",",colClasses=c("Date","numeric","numeric","numeric"))
>
> But I am getting an error:
>
> Error in charToDate(x) :
>  character string is not in a standard unambiguous format
>
>
> because my date vector is in a format below:
>
> format="%d.%m.%Y"
>
>
> But how can i define the date format for date vector in read.table
> function....?

It is easiest to simply read the column as character, and convert 
later by as.Date(x, format="%d.%m.%Y")

You might want to consider using read.delim2 to get all the usual 
defaults for a tab-delimited file in a locale using comma as decimal 
separator.

>
> Br,
> Jack
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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