Converting text string (spanish month string) to date-CodePudding

I am trying to convert the following to dates - where I have the day in numeric, the month in text and year in numeric.

dates = c("26 december, 2014", "23 november, 2018", "1 October, 2007", "31 august, 2013")

EDIT:

dates2 = c("13 marzo, 2017", "22 junio, 2018", "24 octubre, 2017", "19 julio, 2018", "14 septiembre, 2017", "3 diciembre, 2015", "23 enero, 2018", "26 septiembre, 2016", "2 agosto, 2017", "3 enero, 2018")
parse_date_time(dates, orders= "dmy")

Gives:

 [1] NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
Warning message:
All formats failed to parse. No formats found.

CodePudding user response：

Update: for spanish dates:

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "Spanish_Spain.1252")
format <- "%a@%A@%b@%B@%p@"
enc2utf8(unique(format(lubridate:::.date_template, format = format)))
str(lubridate:::.get_locale_regs("Spanish_Spain.1252"))

library(lubridate)

dates2 = c("13 marzo, 2017", "22 junio, 2018", "24 octubre, 2017", "19 julio, 2018", "14 septiembre, 2017", "3 diciembre, 2015", "23 enero, 2018", "26 septiembre, 2016", "2 agosto, 2017", "3 enero, 2018")

parse_date_time(dates2, orders= "dmy")

output: spanish dates:

 [1] "2017-03-13 UTC" "2018-06-22 UTC" "2017-10-24 UTC"
 [4] "2018-07-19 UTC" "2017-09-14 UTC" "2015-12-03 UTC"
 [7] "2018-01-23 UTC" "2016-09-26 UTC" "2017-08-02 UTC"
[10] "2018-01-03 UTC"

First answer:

In addition to akrun's answer in comments lubridate::dmy(dates) We could use lubridates parse_date_time function. Essential is to apply the orders, here day month year:

library(lubridate)

parse_date_time(dates, orders= "dmy")

[1] "2014-12-26 UTC" "2018-11-23 UTC" "2007-10-01 UTC"
[4] "2013-08-31 UTC"

CodePudding user response：

You could use a dictionary, gsub in this case Spanish to English in a for loop, and convert as.Date.

dict <- structure(list(Spanish = c("enero", "febrero", "marzo", "abril",
"mayo", "junio", "julio", "agosto", "septiembre", "octubre",
"noviembre", "diciembre"), English = c("January", "February",
"March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September",
"October", "November", "December")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA,
-12L))

for (i in seq_len(nrow(dict))) {
  dates2 <- with(dict, gsub(Spanish[i], English[i], dates2))
}

as.Date(dates2, '%d %B, %Y')
# [1] "2017-03-13" "2018-06-22" "2017-10-24" "2018-07-19" "2017-09-14" "2015-12-03"
# [7] "2018-01-23" "2016-09-26" "2017-08-02" "2018-01-03"

Data:

dates2 <- c("13 marzo, 2017", "22 junio, 2018", "24 octubre, 2017", "19 julio, 2018", 
            "14 septiembre, 2017", "3 diciembre, 2015", "23 enero, 2018", 
            "26 septiembre, 2016", "2 agosto, 2017", "3 enero, 2018")