Converting year and month (“yyyy-mm” format) to a date?

Question

I have a dataset that looks like this:

Month    count
2009-01  12
2009-02  310
2009-03  2379
2009-04  234
2009-05  14
2009-08  1
2009-09  34
2009-10  2386
         


        

Answer 1

You could also achieve this with the parse_date_time or fast_strptime functions from the lubridate-package:

> parse_date_time(dates1, "ym")
[1] "2009-01-01 UTC" "2009-02-01 UTC" "2009-03-01 UTC"

> fast_strptime(dates1, "%Y-%m")
[1] "2009-01-01 UTC" "2009-02-01 UTC" "2009-03-01 UTC"

The difference between those two is that parse_date_time allows for lubridate-style format specification, while fast_strptime requires the same format specification as strptime.

For specifying the timezone, you can use the tz-parameter:

> parse_date_time(dates1, "ym", tz = "CET")
[1] "2009-01-01 CET" "2009-02-01 CET" "2009-03-01 CET"

When you have irregularities in your date-time data, you can use the truncated-parameter to specify how many irregularities are allowed:

> parse_date_time(dates2, "ymdHMS", truncated = 3)
[1] "2012-06-01 12:23:00 UTC" "2012-06-01 12:00:00 UTC" "2012-06-01 00:00:00 UTC"

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Used data:

dates1 <- c("2009-01","2009-02","2009-03")
dates2 <- c("2012-06-01 12:23","2012-06-01 12",'2012-06-01")