[R] Problem working with dates

[R. Michael Weylandt]

I think you are making the transform much more complicated than it needs to be:

Suppose you have a data frame with a bunch of things that look like
dates but are really factors:

Then the following transform should work from factor to Date:

df <- as.Date(as.character(df), format = "%Y/%m/%d")

and to address the mistyped element:

df[df == "11/2321931"] <- "11/23/1931"

You should probably do this before the conversion to date type. If you
want to do it in a look up-ish sort of way, this is probably better:

within(Demo, DOB[Subject == 108945] <- "11/23/1931")

Michael


On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Paul Miller <pjmiller_57 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I've been reading books about R for awhile now and am in the process of replicating the SAS analyses from an old report. I want to be sure that I can do all the things I need to in R before using it in my daily work.
>
> So far, I've managed to read in all my data and have done some data manipulation. I'm having trouble with fixing an error in a date variable though, and was hoping someone could help.
>
> One of the patients in my data has a DOB incorrectly entered as:
>
> '11/23/21931'
>
> Their DOB should be:
>
> '11/23/1931'
>
> How can I correct this problem before calculating age in the code below?
> DOB starts out as a factor in the Demo dataframe but then is converted into a date. So I had thought the ifelse that follows could be used to correct the problem, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
>
> Demo_Char <- within(Demo, {
> DateCompleted <- as.Date(DateCompleted, format = "%m/%d/%Y")
> DOB <- as.Date(DOB, format = "%m/%d/%Y")
> DOB <- ifelse(Subject==108945, as.Date("1931-11-23"), DOB)
> Age <- as.integer((DateCompleted - DOB) / 365.25)
> })
>
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