[R] datetime and date

[Jeff Newmiller]

Please read the Posting Guide, which warns you to (among other things) post in plain text and provide a reproducible example.

Read ?strptime. Note that you must provide a format that matches the data you parse with it.

If you have both formats because you are also using Excel, you can fix the inconsistent formatting quickly by re-loading it in Excel and setting a uniform cell format for that column before saving again as csv.

If you really need to do this in R, you will have to convert twice, once for each format, and transfer the non-NA values from one result vector to the other. Something like (untested): 
dtm1 <- as.POSIXct(as.character(df$Date1, format = "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M"))
dtm2 <- as.POSIXct(as.character(df$Date1, format = "%d/%m/%Y"))
ok2 <- !is.na(dtm2)
dtm1[ok2] <- dtm2[ok2]
df$Date1 <- dtm1

Note: I recommend always setting the TZ environment variable appropriately for the data you are working with before converting character to POSIXt types. Whether this works and what to set it to can be frustratingly system-dependent and since you did not follow the posting guidelines you will have to search for that info yourself.
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On February 2, 2014 5:53:22 PM PST, Yolande Tra <yolande.tra at gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I have the following issue. The dataframe  df has a column (Date1)
>supposed
>to be a date but read as a factor. There are two types of values in the
>same column Date1
>Type 1 are datetime like "5/23/2008 0:00:00"
>Type 2 have no time like "1/10/13".
>
>When I apply the following to the date column
>df$Date1<-as.POSIXct(as.character(df$Date1, format = "%d/%m/%Y"))
>
>For type 1 I got the expected result: "2008-05-23"
>For type 2 I got NA.
>
>I have searched but could not solve it. Please help.
>
>Thanks,
>Yolande
>
>	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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