textToDate: Convert dates in a wide variety of formats to IDate

In CALIBERdatamanage: Data Management Tools for CALIBER Datasets

Description

Automatically detects date format (including UK vs. US dates) and converts dates to IDate. Uses the pvec function of the parallel package if loaded.

Usage

textToDate(x, missingformat = c('0000-00-00',
    '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '', 'NA'))

Arguments

x	a string representing a date
missingformat	strings which represent missing dates

Details

The function first tries out different formats on the non-missing values, including US and UK formats (UK is default). It chooses the format which results in valid dates. All dates in the datestring must have the same format.

Value

a vector of class IDate if successful, or the original character string if not.

Examples

##
print(textToDate(c('13/6/1970'))) # UK format
print(textToDate(c('6/13/1970'))) # US format
print(textToDate(c('13/6/1970', '6/13/1970'))) # conflict
print(textToDate(c('2009-07-08', '0000-00-00'))) # with blank
print(textToDate(c('5/6/1970', NA, '7/8/1980'))) # missing
print(textToDate(c('5/6/1970', '', '7/8/1980'))) # blank date
print(textToDate(c('5/6/1970', 'NA', NA, '7/8/1980'))) # missing
print(textToDate(c('5/6/1970', '0000-00-00', NA, '7/8/1980'))) # missing
print(textToDate(c('5/6/1970', '70/5/1980', '7/8/1980'))) # illegal 

CALIBERdatamanage documentation built on Nov. 23, 2021, 3 p.m.