G'day fellow Pacific rim dwellers, On Wed, 11-Nov-2009 at 11:13AM +0800, Berwin A Turlach wrote:
|> G'day Isabella, |> [...] |> > However, when trying to convert a character date from the year 2000 |> > to a Julian date, I get an <NA> instead of the desired Julian date: |> > |> > > as.date("02-MAY-00", order="mdy") # convert May 2, 2000 to a Julian |> > > date |> > [1] <NA> |> > |> > Not quite sure why R is unable to handle this type of date (perhaps it |> > thinks it comes from the year 1900?!). |> |> My guess it thinks it comes from the year 0. Not sure why it cannot |> handle such dates. But then, as far as I know, there is actually some |> discussion about whether the year 0 exist or whether we went straight |> from 1BC to 1AD...... I've not used the date package, but to do what's required, the base function as.Date is adequate. > as.Date("02-May-00", "%d-%b-%y") [1] "2000-05-02" > The help for strptime is informative: '%y' Year without century (00-99). If you use this on input, which century you get is system-specific. So don't! Often values up to 68 (or 69) are prefixed by 20 and 69 (or 70) to 99 by 19. '%Y' Year with century. On my system, I get this: > as.Date("02-May-00", "%d-%b-%Y") [1] "0-05-02" > That goes some way to explaining a few things, though you might get something else for the first one. HTH -- ~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~. ___ Patrick Connolly {~._.~} Great minds discuss ideas _( Y )_ Average minds discuss events (:_~*~_:) Small minds discuss people (_)-(_) ..... Eleanor Roosevelt ~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.