toDate: Convert strings to date

In sameermanek/mmisc: Miscellaneous functions and tools which I find useful

Description

toDate converts a raw date format (e.g., YY-MM-DD, MM-DD-YYYY, etc) into a normalized date format (YYYY-MM-DD) as a character vector. This is less clumsy than casting using as.character(as.Date(..., format = ....)) assuming your goal is to create the normalized character output. While not intuitive, it will also perform basic validation and is much, much quicker (through hashing, allowing multiple formats, and short-circuiting) than alternatives (inat least for my use case where I have many values, many of which are repeated)

Usage

toDate(chr.date.raw, lst.date.formats = NULL, log.stop.on.invalid = TRUE)

Arguments

chr.date.raw	The input date vector, as characters
lst.date.formats	Date formats, in the form of a list, with associated validation. For example, lst.date.formats = list(c(validation = '^[0-9]{2}[a-zA-Z]{3}20[0-9]{2}$', format = '%d%b%Y')) . You can include as many formats as you'd like within the lst.date.formats
log.stop.on.invalid	Should this function stop if any (non-NA) element of chr.date.raw doesn't validate across any of the validation criteria?

Value

The character vector (same ordering) in format YYYY-MM-DD

Examples

toDate(c('03/15/2013','03MAR2015','2015-03-12'))

sameermanek/mmisc documentation built on May 24, 2019, 7:19 a.m.