Extract Date in R

Question

I struggle mightily with dates in R and could do this pretty easily in SPSS, but I would love to stay within R for my project.

I have a date column in my data fram

Answer 1

Is this what you are looking for?

library(ggplot2)
## make up data for two seasons a and b
a = as.Date("2010/10/1")
b = as.Date("2011/10/1")
a.date <- seq(a, by='1 week', length=28)
b.date <- seq(b, by='1 week', length=28)

## make up some score data  
a.score <- abs(trunc(rnorm(28, mean = 10, sd = 5)))
b.score <- abs(trunc(rnorm(28, mean = 10, sd = 5)))

## create a data frame   
df <- data.frame(a.date, b.date, a.score, b.score)
df

## Since I am using ggplot I better create a "long formated" data frame
df.molt <- melt(df, measure.vars = c("a.score", "b.score"))
levels(df.molt$variable) <- c("First season", "Second season")
df.molt

Then, I am using ggplot2 for plotting the data:

## plot it
ggplot(aes(y = value, x = a.date), data = df.molt) + geom_point() +   
geom_line() + facet_wrap(~variable, ncol = 1) + 
scale_x_date("Date", format = "%m-%d")

If you want to modify the x-axis (e.g., display format), then you'll probably be interested in scale_date.