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

I think @ben-rollert's solution is a good solution.

You just have to be careful if you want to use this solution in a function inside a new package.

When developping packages, it's recommended to use the syntaxe packagename::function_name() (see http://kbroman.org/pkg_primer/pages/depends.html).

In this case, you have to use the version of as.Date() defined by the zoo library.

Here is an example :

> devtools::session_info()
Session info ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 setting  value                       
 version  R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21)
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu           
 ui       RStudio (1.0.35)            
 language (EN)                        
 collate  C                           
 tz                               
 date     2016-11-09                  

Packages --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 package  * version date       source        
 devtools   1.12.0  2016-06-24 CRAN (R 3.3.1)
 digest     0.6.10  2016-08-02 CRAN (R 3.2.3)
 memoise    1.0.0   2016-01-29 CRAN (R 3.2.3)
 withr      1.0.2   2016-06-20 CRAN (R 3.2.3)

> as.Date(zoo::as.yearmon("1989-10", "%Y-%m")) 
Error in as.Date.default(zoo::as.yearmon("1989-10", "%Y-%m")) : 
  do not know how to convert 'zoo::as.yearmon("1989-10", "%Y-%m")' to class “Date”

> zoo::as.Date(zoo::as.yearmon("1989-10", "%Y-%m"))
[1] "1989-10-01"

So if you're developping a package, the good practice is to use :

zoo::as.Date(zoo::as.yearmon("1989-10", "%Y-%m"))