Parse dates from many formats

Convert many date and date-time (POSIXct) formats as may be received from Microsoft Excel.

Usage

convert_to_date(
  x,
  ...,
  character_fun = lubridate::ymd,
  string_conversion_failure = c("error", "warning")
)

convert_to_datetime(
  x,
  ...,
  tz = "UTC",
  character_fun = lubridate::ymd_hms,
  string_conversion_failure = c("error", "warning")
)

Arguments

x

The object to convert

...

Passed to further methods. Eventually may be passed to excel_numeric_to_date(), base::as.POSIXct(), or base::as.Date().

character_fun

A function to convert non-numeric-looking, non-NA values in x to POSIXct objects.

string_conversion_failure

If a character value fails to parse into the desired class and instead returns NA, should the function return the result with a warning or throw an error?

tz

The timezone for POSIXct output, unless an object is POSIXt already. Ignored for Date output.

Value

POSIXct objects for convert_to_datetime() or Date objects for convert_to_date().

Details

Character conversion checks if it matches something that looks like a Microsoft Excel numeric date, converts those to numeric, and then runs convert_to_datetime_helper() on those numbers. Then, character to Date or POSIXct conversion occurs via character_fun(x, ...) or character_fun(x, tz=tz, ...), respectively.

See also

Other date-time cleaning: excel_numeric_to_date(), excel_time_to_numeric(), sas_numeric_to_date()

Examples

convert_to_date("2009-07-06")
#> [1] "2009-07-06"
convert_to_date(40000)
#> [1] "2009-07-06"
convert_to_date("40000.1")
#> [1] "2009-07-06"
# Mixed date source data can be provided.
convert_to_date(c("2020-02-29", "40000.1"))
#> [1] "2020-02-29" "2009-07-06"
convert_to_datetime(
  c("2009-07-06", "40000.1", "40000", NA),
  character_fun = lubridate::ymd_h, truncated = 1, tz = "UTC"
)
#> [1] "2009-07-06 00:00:00 UTC" "2009-07-06 02:24:00 UTC"
#> [3] "2009-07-06 00:00:00 UTC" NA