Converting year and month (“yyyy-mm” format) to a date?

Question

I have a dataset that looks like this:

Month    count
2009-01  12
2009-02  310
2009-03  2379
2009-04  234
2009-05  14
2009-08  1
2009-09  34
2009-10  2386


        

Answer 1

The most concise solution if you need the dates to be in Date format:

library(zoo)
month <- "2000-03"
as.Date(as.yearmon(month))
[1] "2000-03-01"

as.Date will fix the first day of each month to a yearmon object for you.