[R] Converting date vector into a serial date number

[Bert Gunter]

?strptime  and ?paste (to combine your 2 date vector pieces)

Cheers,

Bert
Bert Gunter

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along
and sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )


On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 6:51 AM, Tunga Kantarcı <tungakantarci at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a data frame. One column (call this column a) contains years,
> like 1871, and another column (call this column b) contains months,
> like 2. I need to convert these year-month combinations, stored in
> these two date vectors, into a single serial date number. E.g. year
> 1871 and month 2, stored in different vectors, should return 683429.
> Meanwhile, when I check the class type of columns a and b, they are
> both integer.
>
> In MATLAB this can easily be done using the syntax
>
> output = datenum(a,b,1)
>
> In R, I have tried the as.POSIXct function but did not succeed. I also
> tried the ISOdatetime function but that returned NA for all entries.
> It should be a simple operation but I cannot seem to figure it out.
>
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