Converting date with additional characters in format

Question

I have a string variable that I want to parse to class Date. In addition to the day, year and month, the format has other characters like separators (,

Answer 1

Try this:

as.Date(gsub("[u',()]","",my_data$date), format = '%d %Y %m')

Example with a single string:

d <- "(u'9', u'2005', u'06')"
d <- gsub("[u',()]","",d)
d.date <- as.Date(d, "%d %Y %m")

Result:

d.date
[1] "2005-06-09"