R: Date format conversion

Question

I have Twitter data with the following date format:

date <- "Wed Jan 07 20:57:02 +0000 2015"

Does anyone know if this is a standard date format? And any package that might be able to convert it to mdy?

Answer 1

In base R, you can use format and strptime . strptime converts character representations to POSIXlt, and format will convert the resulting POSIXlt class object to a character representation of the desired format. See ?strptime for more details. There is also a help page for DateTimeClasses .

For this case you can use:

format(
  strptime(date, format="%a %b %d %T %z %Y"),
  "%m-%d-%Y"
  )
#[1] "01-07-2015"

The format is:

abbreviated day of the week                 %a
abbreviated month                           %b
day of month as decimal number              %d
hours:minutes:seconds                       %T
signed offset from UTC in hours and minutes %z
year with century                           %Y

Answer 2

strptime("Jan 07 20:57:02 +0000 2015", format="%b %d %T %z %Y")

我削减了工作日，因为它在我的语言环境中不起作用。