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Convert non-standardized dates to R's Date class

Source: R/fix_date_char.R
fix_date_char.Rd

Converts a character vector (or single character object) from inconsistently formatted dates to R's Date class. Supports numerous separators including /, -, or space. Supports numeric, abbreviation or long-hand month notation. Where day of the month has not been supplied, the first day of the month is imputed by default. Either DMY or YMD is assumed by default. However, the US system of MDY is supported via the format argument.

Usage

fix_date_char(
  dates,
  day.impute = 1,
  month.impute = 7,
  format = "dmy",
  excel = FALSE,
  roman.numeral = FALSE
)

Arguments

dates

Character vector to be converted to R's date class.

day.impute

Integer. Day of the month to be imputed if not available. defaults to 1. Maximum value of 31. If day.impute is greater than the number of days for a given month, then the last day of that month will be imputed. If day.impute = NA, then NA will be imputed for the date instead and a warning will be raised. If day.impute = NULL then instead of imputing the day of the month, the function will fail.

month.impute

Integer. Month to be be imputed if not available. Defaults to 7 (July). If month.impute = NA then NA will be imputed for the date instead and a warning will be raised. If month.impute = NULL then instead of imputing the month, the function will fail.

format

Character. The format which a date is mostly likely to be given in. Either "dmy" (default) or "mdy". If year appears to have been given first, then YMD is assumed for the subject (format argument is not used for these observations)

excel

Logical. If a date is given as only numbers (no separators), and is more than four digits, should the date be assumed to be from Excel which counts the number of days from 1900-01-01? In most programming languages (including R), days are instead calculated from 1970-01-01 and this is the default for this function (excel = FALSE)

roman.numeral

[Experimental] Logical. If TRUE, months detected to have been given as Roman numerals will be converted. Months are given in Roman numerals in some database systems and biological records. Defaults to FALSE as this may occasionally interfere with months in other formats.

Value

A vector of elements belonging to R's built in Date class with the following format yyyy-mm-dd.

See also

fix_date_df which is similar to fix_date_char() except is applicable to columns of a data frame.

Examples

bad.date <- "02 03 2021"
fixed.date <- fix_date_char(bad.date)
fixed.date
#> [1] "2021-03-02"