Converting Character Column to Date in R with Lubridate

user_6151831 0
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I have a character column called date that holds data such as "January 15, 2015" I am trying to convert it to ymd format with the as.date function and I also tried the lubridate package. I have tried methods such as:

shootings$Date <- ymd(shootings$Date))

and

shootings$Date <- as.Date(as.character(shootings$Date))

I Would like it to look like 2013-01-01 (ymd) if possible. but I keep getting a parsing issue or the data just goes in N/A. Any help would be appreciated

lubridate r date
3 Answers

What you want is

mdy("January 15, 2015")
# [1] "2015-01-15"

The problem is that the function name has to correspond to your input format (mdy), not the desired output (ymd).

user_13205350

Using anytime:

# example data
x <- "January 15, 2015"

library(anytime)

anydate(x)
# [1] "2015-01-15"
user_6800680

We can solve this with the lubridate library

library(lubridate)

shootings %>% mdy(January 15, 2015)

output - 2015-01-15
user_168488790
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