I am having some trouble formatting the following date with lubridate. I'm not married to the lubridate approach but can someone recommend a good way to format these wonky Sept dates?
library(lubridate)
df <- data.frame(y=1:5, Date=c("Sept 1 2002","Sept 7 2002","Sept 9 2002","Sept 20 2002","Sept 21 2002"))
I didn't really expect this to work:
df$Date2=mdy(df$Date)
But I do not understand why this one didn't work:
df$Date2=parse_date_time(df$Date, "%b %d %Y")
Any ideas?
It will work if we match the abbreviations as in month.abb. One option would be to remove the 't' in 'Sept' using sub.
mdy(sub('(...).', '\\1', df$Date))
#[1] "2002-09-01 UTC" "2002-09-07 UTC" "2002-09-09 UTC" "2002-09-20 UTC" "2002-09-21 UTC"
and
month.abb
#[1] "Jan" "Feb" "Mar" "Apr" "May" "Jun" "Jul" "Aug" "Sep" "Oct" "Nov" "Dec"
If we look at ?strptime
%b: Abbreviated month name in the current locale on this platform. (Also matches full name on input: in some locales there are no abbreviations of names.)