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rdatetimestrptime

Convert different date-time-formats at once (strptime)

Hi :) I have a column of my data.frame which contains dates in two formats. Here is an short minimal example:

D = data.frame(dates = c("3/31/2016", "01.12.2015"))

       dates
1 3/31/2016
2 01.12.2015

With the nice function strptime I can easily get date-times for each format:

D$date1 <- strptime(D$dates, format = "%m/%d/%Y")
D$date2 <- strptime(D$dates, format = "%d.%m.%Y")

I already managed a workaround with:

D$date12 <- do.call(pmin, c(D[c("date1","date2")], na.rm=TRUE) )

To achieve this:

       dates      date1      date2     date12
1  3/31/2016 2016-03-31       <NA> 2016-03-31
2 01.12.2015       <NA> 2015-12-01 2015-12-01

Is there are more sophisticated way to do this transformation (from dates to date12) at once?

Regards

Solution

  • You can use the anytime package.

    library(anytime)
anytime::addFormats("%d.%m.%Y")
anydate(D$dates)

    Note that the argument in anydate has to be a vector, so just select the coloumn dates.

    Or use lubridate

    parse_date_time(D$dates, c("mdy", "dmy"))