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rdatedatetimedatetime-format

How to convert incomplete date to Date format?

How to convert the below in character to Date format?

YYYY.MM

I am facing an issue dealing with zeroes after decimal points for month 10. Say 

2012.10

appears in my input source data as 

2012.1

with the zero post decimal missing. How do I bring this back in the Date format?

Solution

  • Since you have only year and month, you need to assign some value for day before you convert to date. In the example below, the day has arbitrarily been chosen as 15.

    IF THE INPUT IS CHARACTER

    dates = c("2012.10", "2012.01")

lubridate::ymd(paste0(year_month = dates, day = "15"))
#[1] "2012-10-15" "2012-01-15"

    IF THE INPUT IS NUMERIC

    dates = c(2012.10, 2012.01)

do.call(c, lapply(strsplit(as.character(dates), "\\."), function(d){
    if(nchar(d[2]) == 1){
        d[2] = paste0(d[2],"0")
    }
    lubridate::ymd(paste0(year = d[1], month = d[2], day = "15"))
}))
#[1] "2012-10-15" "2012-01-15"