How can I format my Dates using as.Date() in R?

Question

I have a dataset that looks like this:

Date        AE      AA      AEF     Percent
1/1/2012    1211    1000    3556    0.03
1/2/2012    100     2000    3221    0         


        

Answer 1

ggplot does not necessarily interpret dates well. Have you tried transforming the data into a timeseries

Something like:

# Make data a time series, starting Jan 2009
data.ts<-ts(data, start=c(2009,1),frequency=52)

Then plot it using ggplot.

Answer 2

Read help(as.Date) -- you need to supply a format string as well:

R> as.Date(c("1/1/2001", "1/2/2001", "1/3/2001"), "%m/%d/%Y")
[1] "2001-01-01" "2001-01-02" "2001-01-03"
R>