Is there a shorter way to extract a date from a string?

Question

I wrote code to extract the date from a given string. Given

  > \"Date: 2012-07-29, 12:59AM PDT\"

it extracts

  > \"         


        

Answer 1

Something along the lines of this should work:

x <- "Date: 2012-07-29, 12:59AM PDT"
as.Date(substr(x, 7, 16), format="%Y-%m-%d")