[R] Date format issue.

[David Winsemius]

On Jun 28, 2011, at 8:04 AM, Ashim Kapoor wrote:

> Dear R helpers,
>
> I have 2 questions : -
>
> 1. My excel sheet has a column with dates like 01/03/1980 which is  
> formatted
> as 03/80 when I read this into R it reads as Mar-80.

You should be able to change that from the format menu in Excel. If  
you use a "custom" format of yyyy-mm-dd and then save as csv you get  
dates in "%Y-%m-%d" acceptable format for importing, namely your date  
which on the data entry line appears as 3/1/80 appears in the cell as  
1980-03-01, and likewise in the text output the same way, and could be  
input using a colClasses argument of "Date".

> How can I read it in
> the source format ?
>
> 2.
>
>> v<-c("Mar-80")
>> as.Date(v,format="%b-%y")
> [1] NA
>>
>
> Could someone please tell me where I am wrong in this date format  
> conversion
> ?

-- 

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT