Date conversion: Converting dates that contain day of the week to a normal date format-CodePudding

I've got a dataframe that has the day of the week contained the same field as the D/M/Y, I'm trying to convert it into the traditional format without the day of the week. Dataframe format as follows:

Date: chr [1:9] "Tuesday 4 October 2022" "Wednesday 5 October 2022" "Thursday 6 October 2022"

I would have liked to simply convert that to a more usable format using:

as.Date(df&Date, format = ("%d/%m/%Y"))

But unfortunately I'm getting errors:

Error in as.Date.default(x, ...) : 
  do not know how to convert 'x' to class “Date”

Any advice on how to change this would be most appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

We could use parse_date to automatically detect the format and convert to Datetime format, which is converted to Date class with as.Date

library(parsedate)
as.Date(parse_date(str1))
[1] "2022-10-04"

Or if we want to use the base R, make use of the correct format i.e. %A - for the weekday, %d - for day, %B - for month name and %Y - for 4-digit year

 as.Date(str1, format = "%A %d %B %Y")
[1] "2022-10-04"

For the whole Date column

df$Date <- as.Date(parse_date(df$Date))

df$Date <- as.Date(df$Date, format = "%A %d %B %Y")

data

 str1 <- "Tuesday 4 October 2022"