Hello Everyone,
 
I am a newbie with about a month's worth of experience using R. I've just spent a little time learning how to work with date values. Mostly, this has involved converting text values into dates.
 
So far, I've managed to figure out how to do this in R proper using as.Date. However, I'm still struggling with doing this using SQL and RODBC.
 
In the process of learning to create date values in R proper, I noticed some interesting behavior on the part of the data editor. At first, this led me to believe that my efforts had been unsuccessful. The output from my R console below illustrates this behavior.
 
> test <- mydata
> test$test_date <- as.Date(test$ae_datestarted, format='%m/%d/%Y')
> class(test$test_date)
[1] "Date"
> mode(test$test_date)
[1] "numeric"
> 
> fix(test)
 
(At this point, I clicked on the test_date column)

Warning: class discarded from column ‘test_date’
> 
> class(test$test_date)
[1] "character"
> mode(test$test_date)
[1] "character"
> 
 
When I run my code, it works correctly. But when I open the data frame in the data editor and click on the test_date column, the editor says that it is character. And beyond that, the editor discards the class for test_date. Should the editor do this? Or is it my fault for trying to look at test_date in the editor in the first place? In SAS, I'm used to creating data and then opening the dataset to look at what I've done. Maybe I shouldn't be doing this in R though.
 
Returning to the issue of converting text values to dates using SQL (Server) and RODBC. Does anyone know how ot do this? I've been trying to do this using things like Cast and Convert. Usually, these attempts fail. When SQL Server does seem to be sending something back, it appears that R cannot accept it. Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,
 
Paul     
 


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