Make date readable by R

Question

I have a column in a dataset right now formatted for example as "Aug-19" which represents 08/01/2019 in mm/dd/yyyy format. How do I convert this into a format that can be read by R?

Answer 1

You can use lubridate package.

dates <- c("Aug-19", "Sep-19")

dates_myd <- paste0(dates, "-01")

lubridate::myd(dates_myd)

Answer 2

With lubridate we can also do

myd(dates, truncated = 1)
#[1] "2019-08-01" "2019-09-01"

data

dates <- c("Aug-19", "Sep-19")