R function to fix automatically formatted data - r

Question

I am currently analyzing a baseball data set that has the count data included, however, some of the data has automatically been formatted as a date.
I have already tried using as.numeric but it does not help. I have provided a sample of the data below:
Count(Factor) 0-0 0-1 0-2 1-Feb 1-Jan 1-Mar 2-Feb 2-Jan 2-Mar
Feb-00 Jan-00 Mar-00
I would like to remove the date format. For instance, I want to see 1-Feb as 1-2, 1-Jan as 1-1, 1-Mar as 1-3, Feb-00 as 2-0.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do so?

Answer 1

You can replace the abbreviated months with their relevant calendar position by referencing months.abb. Below I have created a general function using Base R.
## function to apply
month_num <- function(x){
if (! grepl('\\w{3}', x))
return(x)
gsub('/?\\w{3}', as.character(match(regmatches(x, regexpr('(\\w{3})', x)), month.abb)), x)
}
## vector
strings <- c( '0-0', '0-1' ,'0-2', '1-Feb', '1-Jan', '1-Mar', '2-Feb', '2-Jan', '2-Mar', 'Feb-00', '/Jan-00', 'Mar-00')
sapply(strings, month_num, USE.NAMES = FALSE)
#> [1] "0-0" "0-1" "0-2" "1-2" "1-1" "1-3" "2-2" "2-1" "2-3" "2-00"
#> [11] "1-00" "3-00"
## data.frame or matrix
tmp <- data.frame(
strings = c( '0-0', '0-1' ,'0-2', '1-Feb', '1-Jan', '1-Mar', '2-Feb', '2-Jan', '2-Mar', 'Feb-00', '/Jan-00', 'Mar-00')
)
tmp$strings <- apply(tmp, 1, month_num)
tmp
#> strings
#> 1 0-0
#> 2 0-1
#> 3 0-2
#> 4 1-2
#> 5 1-1
#> 6 1-3
#> 7 2-2
#> 8 2-1
#> 9 2-3
#> 10 2-00
#> 11 1-00
#> 12 3-00
## list
strings <- list( '0-0', '0-1' ,'0-2', '1-Feb', '1-Jan', '1-Mar', '2-Feb', '2-Jan', '2-Mar', 'Feb-00', '/Jan-00', 'Mar-00')
strings <- lapply(strings, month_num)
tail(strings)
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "2-2"
#>
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "2-1"
#>
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "2-3"
#>
#> [[4]]
#> [1] "2-00"
#>
#> [[5]]
#> [1] "1-00"
#>
#> [[6]]
#> [1] "3-00"
Created on 2019-02-12 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)