R Tutorial: Introduction to dates

Key Takeaways

welcome to working with dates and times in our in this course you'll master importing manipulating and computing with dates and times to explore whether scheduled meetings and calculate reigns of monarchs in this chapter you'll learn about hours built-in objects for handling dates and times let's start with dates where I grew up in New Zealand we always put day of the month first then month then year but in the US the convention is month first then day of the month then year this can get confusing surely one of them must be more correct it turns out there is a global standard called ISO 8601 that specifies the correct way to share dates to avoid all confusion it says all of the components and decreasing units that is year month then day turns out both the US and New Zealand conventions are wrong all these other formats also don't comply with ISO 8601 please don't try to give our dates painted on a black cat the ISO 8601 standard specifies the order of the components but also a few other details about the day for example each component has a fixed number of digits year has four and day and month too if you only need one digit for the day or month you must pair it with leading zeros you don't have to use a separator in the ISO standard but if you do it must be a - and dates so the date the 1st of January 2011 an ISO 8601 standard is 2011 - 0 1 - 0 1 if you have a date in the ISO 8601 format it still takes a little work to get our to recognise it as a date if you tried it just in put it on the console I will interpret the dashes as subtraction and you will end up with something a little surprising you might think using quotes will help certainly looks like a date but are still thinks it's just a to string the secret to getting our to recognize dates is telling it explicitly this is a date with the s date function s dot date takes a character string and turns it into a date object it will only work with dates in the ISO order but you'll see how to handle other formats in chapter 2 there are also a couple of packages that will automatically import dates in a wider range of formats you'll see two examples in the exercises read R and any time alright let's get some dates into our