[R] Assigning categorical values to dates

[Tom Woolman]

Couldn't you convert the date columns to character type data in a data  
frame, and then convert those strings to factors in a 2nd step?

The only downside I think to treating dates as factor levels is that  
you might have an awful lot of factors if you have a large enough  
dataset.



Quoting "N. F. Parsons" <nathan.f.parsons using gmail.com>:

> Hi all,
>
> If I have a tibble as follows:
>
> tibble(dates = c(rep("2021-07-04", 2),  rep("2021-07-25", 3),
> rep("2021-07-18", 4)))
>
> how in the world do I add a column that evaluates each of those dates and
> assigns it a categorical value such that
>
> dates                cycle
> <chr>               <chr>
> 2021-07-04      1
> 2021-07-04      1
> 2021-07-25      3
> 2021-07-25      3
> 2021-07-25      3
> 2021-07-18      2
> 2021-07-18      2
> 2021-07-18      2
> 2021-07-18      2
>
> Not to further complicate matters, but some months I may only have one
> date, and some months I will have 4 dates - so thats not a fixed quantity.
> We've literally been doing this by hand at my job and I'd like to automate
> it.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Nate Parsons
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.