Jeroen Ooms wrote:
Ah Phil Spector is right, nothing is converted. I'm almost too embarrassed to
admit it, but actually, it was Excel that tricked me. It displays date
fields differently than they are stored in the csv file, and once you press
'save', it saves everything to a different format, completely unasked.
Exactly. There are some devastating gotchas with Excel and dates.
For example, in a medical study I was analysing, Excel decided that a NZ
National Health Index number of AUG1838 was a date and converted it to
Aug-99.
My rule is never, ever, ever save a .csv file from within Excel. Use
.csv files created by other software, yes, but not one saved from within
Excel.
David Scott
Nevertheless I got some valuable insight in the topic. What I'm trying to do
here is make it easier for people to upload files that might contain dates
to my webapp at yeroon.net/ggplot2. Currently, dates are imported as
factors. I would like to implement something that Henrique described, to
automatically convert variables to Date that are obviously dates.
--
_________________________________________________________________
David Scott Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland, PB 92019
Auckland 1142, NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 9 923 5055, or +64 9 373 7599 ext 85055
Email: d.sc...@auckland.ac.nz, Fax: +64 9 373 7018
Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics
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