as.Date yields NA for month name “März” (march)

Question

I got a scraped character vector with dates. My problem: When using as.Date(), every date containing the month name \"März\" (= which means \"march\" in German)

Answer 1

I also had a quite similar issue. I'm going to write the solution I found hoping to help users with Italian local system setting

 Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME")

[1] "Italian_Italy.1252"

and I had to convert factors to date: factors were

levels(dates)

[1] "1. Jun. 2012" "11. Sep. 2012" "19. Oct. 2012" "20. Mar. 2013" "28. Jun. 2012" [6] "7. May. 2012"

This produced NA in the conversion for all months but March (because the abbreviation is the same in Italian)

 head(as.Date(dates, format= "%d. %b. %Y"))

[1] NA NA NA NA NA NA

 summary(GEM_variability$date)

    Min.      1st Qu.       Median         Mean      3rd Qu.         Max. 

"2013-03-20" "2013-03-20" "2013-03-20" "2013-03-20" "2013-03-20" "2013-03-20" NA's "559"

I found the solution in the help file of ?strftime

lct <- Sys.getlocale("LC_TIME"); Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "C")
dates<- as.Date(date, format="%d. %b. %Y")
#dates<- strptime(date, format="%d. %b. %Y")
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", lct)