Dealing with Messy Dates

Question

I hope you didn\'t think I was asking for relationship advice.

Infrequently, I have to offer survey respondents the ability to specify when an event occurred. What resu

Answer 1

This may be one of the few cases where another tool other than R is the best to use. I know that there are some modules for Perl that have already been developed to parse messy looking dates, on module DateTime::Format::Natural::Lang::EN can parse strings like: "1st tuesday last november". I seem to remember another module that could understand things like "the second tuesday after the first Monday in February".

There is also a tool at http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ that grabs what looks like dates in text and converts them to a standard format.