R: String to Date or NA
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Join For FreeI’ve been trying to clean up a CSV file which contains some rows with dates and some not – I only want to keep the cells which do have dates so I’ve been trying to work out how to do that.
My first thought was that I’d try and find a function which would convert the contents of the cell into a date if it was in date format and NA if not. I could then filter out the NA values using the is.na function.
I started out with the as.Date function…
> as.Date("2014-01-01") [1] "2014-01-01" > as.Date("foo") Error in charToDate(x) : character string is not in a standard unambiguous format
…but that throws an error if we have a non date value so it’s not so useful in this case.
Instead we can make use of the strptime function which does exactly what we want:
> strptime("2014-01-01", "%Y-%m-%d") [1] "2014-01-01 GMT" > strptime("foo", "%Y-%m-%d") [1] NA
We can then feed those values into is.na..
> strptime("2014-01-01", "%Y-%m-%d") %>% is.na() [1] FALSE > strptime("foo", "%Y-%m-%d") %>% is.na() [1] TRUE
…and we have exactly the behaviour we were looking for.
Published at DZone with permission of Mark Needham, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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