Find the day of a week

Question

Let\'s say that I have a date in R and it\'s formatted as follows.

   date      
2012-02-01 
2012-02-01
2012-02-02

Is there any way in R to

Answer 1

Let's say you additionally want the week to begin on Monday (instead of default on Sunday), then the following is helpful:

require(lubridate)
df$day = ifelse(wday(df$time)==1,6,wday(df$time)-2)

The result is the days in the interval [0,..,6].

If you want the interval to be [1,..7], use the following:

df$day = ifelse(wday(df$time)==1,7,wday(df$time)-1)

... or, alternatively:

df$day = df$day + 1

Answer 2

start = as.POSIXct("2017-09-01")
end = as.POSIXct("2017-09-06")

dat = data.frame(Date = seq.POSIXt(from = start,
                                   to = end,
                                   by = "DSTday"))

# see ?strptime for details of formats you can extract

# day of the week as numeric (Monday is 1)
dat$weekday1 = as.numeric(format(dat$Date, format = "%u"))

# abbreviated weekday name
dat$weekday2 = format(dat$Date, format = "%a")

# full weekday name
dat$weekday3 = format(dat$Date, format = "%A")

dat
# returns
    Date       weekday1 weekday2  weekday3
1 2017-09-01        5      Fri    Friday
2 2017-09-02        6      Sat    Saturday
3 2017-09-03        7      Sun    Sunday
4 2017-09-04        1      Mon    Monday
5 2017-09-05        2      Tue    Tuesday
6 2017-09-06        3      Wed    Wednesday

Answer 3

Use the lubridate package and function wday:

library(lubridate)
df$date <- as.Date(df$date)
wday(df$date, label=TRUE)
[1] Wed   Wed   Thurs
Levels: Sun < Mon < Tues < Wed < Thurs < Fri < Sat

Answer 4

Look up ?strftime:

%A Full weekday name in the current locale

df$day = strftime(df$date,'%A')

Answer 5

form comment of JStrahl format(as.Date(df$date),"%w"), we get number of current day : as.numeric(format(as.Date("2016-05-09"),"%w"))

Answer 6

df = data.frame(date=c("2012-02-01", "2012-02-01", "2012-02-02")) 
df$day <- weekdays(as.Date(df$date))
df
##         date       day
## 1 2012-02-01 Wednesday
## 2 2012-02-01 Wednesday
## 3 2012-02-02  Thursday

Edit: Just to show another way...

The wday component of a POSIXlt object is the numeric weekday (0-6 starting on Sunday).

as.POSIXlt(df$date)$wday
## [1] 3 3 4

which you could use to subset a character vector of weekday names

c("Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", 
    "Friday", "Saturday")[as.POSIXlt(df$date)$wday + 1]
## [1] "Wednesday" "Wednesday" "Thursday"