Lubridate Package
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Working with dates in R (without crying)
With almost any coding language, working with date and time data is a nightmare. Data-generating systems all use different formats, countries all display information in different ways, and your boss has a personal preference to see dates displayed MM/YYYY/DD. Lubridate is an R package that makes working with dates of any format simple.
This package works by having an easy way to parse data of any format into the lubridate format and just as intuitive functions to extract the elements you need. Check out the example video below to see how to parse and extract data and this reference sheet contains a large list of the different functions you can use.
Example
A quick introduction to parsing dates and extracting information using lubridate.
Code from Video
(click the arrow to expand)
library(lubridate)
birthday <- '09/1996/30'
bday_parsed <- myd(birthday)
month(bday_parsed)
month(bday_parsed, label = TRUE)
month(bday_parsed, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE)
date(bday_parsed)
cat(month(bday_parsed), '/', day(bday_parsed), '/', year(bday_parsed), sep = '')
today <- Sys.time()
today_parsed <- ymd_hms(today)
as.numeric(date(today_parsed) - date(bday_parsed)) / 365