How do I convert the my current Date into an integer value in R?

Question

This is my data:

## # A tibble: 1,096 x 2
##    Date            rider_count
##    <chr>                 <dbl>
##  1 Fri 1 Apr 2016         8755
##  2 Fri 1 Dec 2017        14252
##  3 Fri 1 Jan 2016         1299
##  4 Fri 1 Jul 2016         8993
##  5 Fri 1 Jun 2018        12967
##  6 Fri 1 Sep 2017        10871
##  7 Fri 10 Aug 2018       12580
##  8 Fri 10 Feb 2017       14562
##  9 Fri 10 Jun 2016        6450
## 10 Fri 10 Mar 2017        7361
## # ... with 1,086 more rows

I want to convert the Date such as "Fri 1 Jan 2016" into "20160101". How do I do this? Thanks!!

Also note that parsing abbreviated day of week / month name is locale sensitive. See e.g. [strptime, as.POSIXct and as.Date return unexpected NA](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13726894/strptime-as-posixct-and-as-date-return-unexpected-na) — Henrik, Aug 04 '21 at 20:19

akrun · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-04T20:06:53.413

1

We need to first convert to Date class and then format before converting to integer

as.integer(format(as.Date(df1$Date, format = '%a %d %b %Y'), '%Y%m%d'))

The abbreviations can be checked in the documentation of strptime with help('strptime') or ?strptime

%a - Abbreviated weekday name in the current locale on this platform.

%d - day of the month

%b - Abbreviated month name

%Y - Year with century

edited Aug 04 '21 at 20:06

answered Aug 04 '21 at 20:04

akrun

789,025
32
460
575

1

Such a elaborated explanation, love it :) – ThomasIsCoding Aug 04 '21 at 20:06
It returned all the date in numeric format, however how do I put this and replace the original date in my data. So I want to replace the converted format back into Date in my data? – Aug 04 '21 at 20:19
1

@JesseLingLing just do `df1$Date – akrun Aug 04 '21 at 20:20

How do I convert the my current Date into an integer value in R?

1 Answers1