R Dates

Dates

Dates can also be input as a class to an object

The Date has to be entered as a character type

It can then be converted to date type by using ‘as.Date()’ function

The following example converts a string to Date class

newDate1 <- "2019-02-14"
	class(newDate1)
	[1] "character"

	#To convert String to Date, use as.Date
	newDate2 <- as.Date(newDate1)
	newDate2
	[1] "2019-02-14"

	class(newDate2)
	[1] "Date"

The Default format of Date in R is “YYYY-MM-DD”

Note: Initially we store them as character variables but we can convert them to date class.

To change the default date format, the following parameters can be used with the ‘format()’ function

In the examples shown above, format() function is used to change the format of the data

R has built-in functions to check the following

Sys.time()
	[1] "2019-02-09 12:52:50 IST"

Sys.Date()
	[1] "2019-02-09"

Sys.timezone()
	[1] "Asis/Calcutta"