date objects in month day format - r

I was wondering if there is a way for R to turn this format into any date object. The format is 'month [space] day'. For example: Jan 1 or Jul 29 or Jul 30. I just want those examples to be read as a date object so I can manipulate them.

Yes, use as.Date, but you also have to specify a year:
x <- c("Jan 1", "Jul 29", "Jul 30")
as.Date(paste("2012", x), format="%Y %b %d")
[1] "2012-01-01" "2012-07-29" "2012-07-30"
See ?as.Date for more help on Date objects, and ?strptime for help on the formatting codes.

Related

convert "2014-05" into date format as "May 2015" for display in ggplot in R

I have date in this character format "2017-03" and I want to convert it in "March 2017" for display in ggplot in R. But when I try to convert it using as.Date("2017-03","%Y-%m") it gives NA
You can consider using zoo::as.yearmon function as:
library(zoo)
#Sample data
v <- c("2014-05", "2017-03")
as.yearmon(v, "%Y-%m")
#[1] "May 2014" "Mar 2017"
#if you want the month name to be in full. Then you can format yearmon type as
format(as.yearmon(v, "%Y-%m"), "%B %Y")
#[1] "May 2014" "March 2017"
Parse dates back and forth can be done like this:
The one you mentioned is done by quoting MKR:
Use zoo package
library(zoo)
date <- "2017-03"
as.yearmon(date, "%Y-%m")
#[1] "Mar 2017"
format(as.yearmon(date, "%Y-%m"), "%B %Y")
#[1] "March 2017"
If you want to parse March 2017 or other similar formats back to 2017-03:
Use hms package because base R doesn't provide a nice built-in class for date
library(hms)
DATE <- "March 1 2017"
parse_date(DATE, "%B %d %Y")
#[1] "2017-03-01"
Or if you are parsing dates with foreign language:
foreign_date <- "1 janvier 2018"
parse_date(foreign_date, "%d %B %Y", locale = locale("fr"))
#[1] "2018-01-01"
By using the locale = locale("language") you can parse dates with foreign months names to standard dates. Use this to check the language:
date_names_langs()
-Format:
-Year: %Y(4 digits) %y(2 digits; 00-69->2000-2069, 70-99 -> 1970-1999)
-Month: %m (2 digits), %b (abbreviation: Jan), %B full name January
-Day: %d (2 digits)

Extract time stamps from string and convert to R POSIXct object

Currently, my dataset has a time variable (factor) in the following format:
weekday month day hour min seconds +0000 year
I don't know what the "+0000" field is but all observations have this. For example:
"Tues Feb 02 11:05:21 +0000 2018"
"Mon Jun 12 06:21:50 +0000 2017"
"Wed Aug 01 11:24:08 +0000 2018"
I want to convert these values to POSIXlt or POSIXct objects(year-month-day hour:min:sec) and make them numeric. Currently, using as.numeric(as.character(time-variable)) outputs incorrect values.
Thank you for the great responses! I really appreciate a lot.
Not sure how to reproduce the transition from factor to char, but starting from that this code should work:
t <- unlist(strsplit(as.character("Tues Feb 02 11:05:21 +0000 2018")," "))
strptime(paste(t[6],t[2],t[3], t[4]),format='%Y %b %d %H:%M:%S')
PS: More on date formats and conversion: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~s133/dates.html
For this problem you can get by without using lubridate. First, to extract individual dates we can use regmatches and gregexpr:
date_char <- 'Tue Feb 02 11:05:21 +0000 2018 Mon Jun 12 06:21:50 +0000 2017'
ptrn <- '([[:alpha:]]{3} [[:alpha:]]{3} [[:digit:]]{2} [[:digit:]]{2}\\:[[:digit:]]{2}\\:[[:digit:]]{2} \\+[[:digit:]]{4} [[:digit:]]{4})'
date_vec <- unlist( regmatches(date_char, gregexpr(ptrn, date_char)))
> date_vec
[1] "Tue Feb 02 11:05:21 +0000 2018" "Mon Jun 12 06:21:50 +0000 2017"
You can learn more about regular expressions here.
In the above example +0000 field is the UTC offset in hours e.g. it would be -0500 for EST timezone. To convert to R date-time object:
> as.POSIXct(date_vec, format = '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y', tz = 'UTC')
[1] "2018-02-02 11:05:21 UTC" "2017-06-12 06:21:50 UTC"
which is the desired output. The formats can be found here or you can use lubridate::guess_formats(). If you don't specify the tz, you'll get the output in your system's time zone (e.g. for me that would be EST). Since the offset is specified in the format, R correctly carries out the conversion.
To get numeric values, the following works:
> as.numeric(as.POSIXct(date_vec, format = '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %z %Y', tz = 'UTC'))
[1] 1517569521 1497248510
Note: this is based on uniform string structure. In the OP there was Tues instead of Tue which wouldn't work. The above example is based on the three-letter abbreviation which is the standard reporting format.
If however, your data is a mix of different formats, you'd have to extract individual time strings (customized regexes, of course), then use lubridate::guess_formats() to get the formats and then use those to carry out the conversion.
Hope this is helpful!!

Convert numeric data such as "715" into Date "July-2015" in R

I would like to friendly ask a question about converting numeric data into Date format.
I would like to convert the numeric data like:
time1<-c(715, 1212, 0416)
to
July-2015, Dec-2012, Apr-2016
I have tried these code but it is not working.
time2<-as.Date(as.character(time1), format="%m%y")
Does anyone have some ideas to solve this issue?
Part of the issue is that "July 2015", "December 2012", and "April 2016" are not dates since the specific day is missing. Another approach is to convert to zoo::yearmon. Here, the numeric input needs to be converted to a string with leading zero so that the month is from 01 to 12:
library(zoo)
ym <- as.yearmon(sprintf("%04d",time1),format="%m%y")
ym
##[1] "Jul 2015" "Dec 2012" "Apr 2016"
The result is of class yearmon, which can then be coerced to Date:
class(ym)
##[1] "yearmon"
d <- as.Date(ym)
d
##[1] "2015-07-01" "2012-12-01" "2016-04-01"
class(d)
##[1] "Date"
Try lubridate::parse_date_time():
library(lubridate)
time2 <- parse_date_time(time1, orders = "my")
format.Date(time2, "%b-%Y")
[1] "juil.-2015" "déc.-2012" "avril-2016" # my locale lang is French

Change date format in R using as.Date

I am new to R and I am trying to change date format in the data frame for date columns. My date column is in format Mar 13 2007 01:05:123AM. Now this date format values are same except day change and time remains same. So I was thinking to change it to format as Mar 13 2007.
I tried the following code:
df <- read.csv("mydata.csv")
df$collectdate <- format(as.Date(df$collectdate,"%b %d %Y"))
but it gives error saying "character string is not in a standard unambiguous format". What can I try next?
You could try:
date <- "Mar 13 2007 01:05:123AM"
gsub("(.*)(?=\\s\\d{2}:).*", "\\1", date, perl=TRUE)
#[1] "Mar 13 2007"
For the as.Date, it didn't show any errors.
format(as.Date(date,"%b %d %Y"), "%b %d %Y")
#[1] "Mar 13 2007

Converting char to date time

In a data.frame, I have a date time stamp in the form:
head(x$time)
[1] "Thu Oct 11 22:18:02 2012" "Thu Oct 11 22:50:15 2012" "Thu Oct 11 22:54:17 2012"
[4] "Thu Oct 11 22:43:13 2012" "Thu Oct 11 22:41:18 2012" "Thu Oct 11 22:15:19 2012"
Everytime I try to convert it with as.Date, lubridate, or zoo I get NAs or Errors.
What is the way to convert this time to a readable form?
I've tried:
Time<-strptime(x$time,format="&m/%d/%Y %H:$M")
x$minute<-parse_date_time(x$time)
x$minute<-mdy(x$time)
x$minute<-as.Date(x$time,"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S")
x$minute<-as.time(x$time)
x$minute<-as.POSIXct(x$time,format="%H:%M")
x$minute<-minute(x$time)
What you really want is strptime(). Try something like:
strptime(x$time, "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y")
As an example of the interesting things you can do with strptime(), consider the following:
thedate <- "I came to your house at 11:45 on January 21, 2012."
strptime(thedate, "I came to your house at %H:%M on %B %d, %Y.")
# [1] "2012-01-21 11:45:00"
Another option is to use lubridate::parse_date_time():
library(lubridate)
parse_date_time(x$time, "%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y")
Or more simply:
parse_date_time(x$time, "abdHMSY")
From the docs:
It differs from base::strptime() in two respects. First, it allows specification of the order in which the formats occur without the need to include separators and % prefix. Such a formating argument is refered to as "order". Second, it allows the user to specify several format-orders to handle heterogeneous date-time character representations.
The docs contain all the formats (the "abdHMSY" etc.) recognized by lubridate.

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