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How to Use Date Formats in R

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In this article, we will be looking at the approaches to using the date formats in the R programming language,

R programming language provides several functions that deal with date and time. These functions are used to format and convert the date from one form to another form. R provides a format function that accepts the date objects and also a format parameter that allows us to specify the format of the date we needed. R provides various format specifiers which are mentioned below in Table-

Specifier

Description

%a

Abbreviated weekday 

%A

Full weekday

%b

Abbreviated month

%B

Full month

%C

Century

%y

Year without century

%Y

Year with century

%d

Day of month (01-31)

%j

Day in Year (001-366)

%m

Month of year (01-12)

%D

Data in %m/%d/%y format

%u

Weekday (01-07) Starts on Monday

Note:To get the Today date, R provides a method called sys.Date() which returns the today date.

Weekday:

In this, we will look into the %a, %A, and %u specifiers which give the abbreviated weekday, full weekday, and numbered weekday starting from Monday.

Example:

R




# today date
date<-Sys.Date()
 
# abbreviated Day
format(date,format="%a")
 
# full Day
format(date,format="%A")
 
# weekday
format(date,format="%u")


Output

[1] "Sat"

[1] "Saturday"

[1] "6"

Date:

Let’s look into the day, month, and year format specifiers to represent dates in different formats.

Example:

R




# today date
date<-Sys.Date()
 
# default format yyyy-mm-dd
date
 
# day in month
format(date,format="%d")
 
# month in year
format(date,format="%m")
 
# abbreviated month
format(date,format="%b")
 
# full month
format(date,format="%B")
 
# Date
format(date,format="%D")
format(date,format="%d-%b-%y")


Output

[1] "2022-04-02"
[1] "02"
[1] "04"
[1] "Apr"
[1] "April"
[1] "04/02/22"
[1] "02-Apr-22"

Year:

We can also able to format the year in different forms. %y, %Y, and %C are the few format specifiers that return the year without century, a year with century, and century of the given date respectively.

Example:

R




# today date
date<-Sys.Date()
 
# year without century
format(date,format="%y")
 
# year with century
format(date,format="%Y")
 
# century
format(date,format="%C")


Output

[1] "22"
[1] "2022"
[1] "20"


Last Updated : 01 Aug, 2023
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