I'm assuming you actually want the date column to be character, not factor: SampleData <- structure(list(id = 1:7, value = c(5813L, 8706L, 4049L, 5877L, 1375L, 2223L, 3423L), date = c("19-Dec-11", "07-Dec-11", "06/05/11", "05/12/11", "31/12/2011", "10/19/2011", "01/22/2011")), .Names = c("id", "value", "date"), row.names = c(NA, -7L), class = "data.frame")
id value date 1 1 5813 19-Dec-11 2 2 8706 07-Dec-11 3 3 4049 06/05/11 4 4 5877 05/12/11 5 5 1375 31/12/2011 6 6 2223 10/19/2011 7 7 3423 01/22/2011 Given this assemblage of dates, there is a lot of ambiguity. The first two are clear, but is the third in May or June? Is the fourth May or December? I had hoped that the number of digits in the year provided a clue, but #5 is clearly dd/mm/yyyy while #7 is mm/dd/yyyy Or actually, #3 could be yy/mm/dd too. I don't see a way to programmatically solve your problem, because there is no clear way to parse all of these dates because of the ambiguity. You could get some of them by checking for values outside the bounds of legitimate month numbers, or just try it and discard the values that give NA results: > as.Date("01/22/2011", "%m/%d/%Y") [1] "2011-01-22" > as.Date("01/22/2011", "%d/%m/%Y") [1] NA But you need more information to figure out the rest. Sarah On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 5:15 PM, farnoosh sheikhi <farnoosh...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi Sarah, > > Thanks for getting back to me. > Here is an example of my data: > SampleData <- structure(list(id = 1:7, value = c(5813L, 8706L, 4049L, 5877L, > 1375L, 2223L, 3423L), date = > structure(c(4L, 3L, 2L, 1L, 7L, > > 6L, 5L), .Label = c("05/12/11", "06/05/11", "07-Dec-11", > > "19-Dec-11", "01/22/2011", "10/19/2011", "31/12/2011" > > ), class = "factor")), .Names = c("id", "value", "date"), row.names = c(NA, > > -7L), class = "data.frame") > SampleData > > Thanks for your help:). > > > > > > > On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 1:50 PM, Sarah Goslee <sarah.gos...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 2:45 PM, farnoosh sheikhi via R-help > > <r-help@r-project.org> wrote: >> Hi Arun, >> Hope all is well with you. I have a data with a column for date.The date >> format is mixed. There are date values with Month/Day/Year format and values >> with Day/Month/Year format.I don't know how to unify it.I really appreciate >> your help.Thanks. > > > You sent this to the R-help list, not just to Arun, so I'm assuming > this is an R question. The best way to get help is to provide a sample > of your data using dput() and to clearly specify what you would like > as the result - "unify" is a bit vague. paste(x, collapse="") could be > considered unification, after all. > > Sarah ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.