Need to convert char type column to date type

Question

I have a data.table with a column named 'Date' and type char and it looks like below. I need to convert this to date type column so that i can perform date operations.

Date
"10/11/2018"
"13/11/2013"
"22/11/2011"
"--"
"--"
"10/11/2018"

I tried this, but doesn't work

MyTable$Date <- as.POXISlt(MyTable$Date)

use lubridate::dmy(Date), you need to install lubridate library — Hunaidkhan, Nov 23 '18 at 11:19
lubridate isn't required, but is nice to use. Alternative is `as.Date("01/11/2018", "%d/%m/%Y")`. See https://www.statmethods.net/input/dates.html — Jonny Phelps, Nov 23 '18 at 11:24
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@JonnyPhelps - I am getting this error as "character string is not in a standard unambiguous format" for as.Date(MyTable$Date) — Yuvaraj, Nov 23 '18 at 12:08

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 23 '18 at 12:17

Welcome to SO!

Using data.table I'd suggest the following:

library(data.table)

MyTable <- data.table(Date = c(
  "10/11/2018",
  "13/11/2013",
  "22/11/2011",
  "--",
  "--",
  "10/11/2018"
))

MyTable[, posixDate := as.POSIXct(Date, format = "%d/%m/%Y")]

If you need to get rid of the NA rows use: na.omit(MyTable)

Need to convert char type column to date type

1 Answers1