Spanish dates in R-CodePudding

I have a vector of dates in R I must modify. The dates, however, are in Spanish. How do I work the data if it's not in English?

As an example, "Jan 02 1987" is "ene 02 1987"

CodePudding user response：

You can (temporarily) change your language to "Spanish" with Sys.setlocale(). For example, on my Windows machine, the following works

# My default locale is (Australian) English
x <- c("Jan 02 1987", "ene 02 1987")
as.Date(x, "%b %d %Y")
#[1] "1987-01-02" NA 

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "Spanish")
as.Date(x, "%b %d %Y")
#[1] NA           "1987-01-02"

Based on your OS, you might have to use a slightly different Sys.setlocale() call. See this post for details.

CodePudding user response：

If Sys.setlocale doesn't work, you can use parse_datefunction from readr package.

For example,

parse_date(c("ene. 30 2016", "feb. 1 2017"), "%b %d %Y", locale = locale("es"))

will return

[1] "2016-01-30" "2017-02-01"

(month is printed in number because of my Sys.locale. It will not matter.)

If your vector does not have . after month,

x <- c("ene 30 2016", "feb 1 2017")    
parse_date(paste(paste0(word(x,1), "."), word(x,2,3)), "%b %d %Y", locale = locale("es"))

will work.