[R-SIG-Mac]Date conversion problems

[John Carew]

Hello,
I have a data set with dates stored as a factor with levels coded as, for
example  "01/03/1996" 

I tried the following:

onset <- strptime(as.character(cf$dx.dt), format="%m%d%Y")

where cf$dx.dt are the dates in the data frame cf.  For output, I get NA
for every entry.  If it matters, I'm running the fink version of R 1.6.1
on a powerbook G4 with OS 10.2.2.  

I have little experience dealing with dates in R.  Is there a reference
that discusses the general issues?

Any help would be much appreciated. 
Thanks,
John

--
John Carew <jcarew@stat.wisc.edu>
Department of Statistics
University of Wisconsin--Madison
http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~jcarew