How to Use Date Formats in R

In this article, we will be looking at the approaches to using the date formats in the R programming language,

R programming language provides several functions that deal with date and time. These functions are used to format and convert the date from one form to another form. R provides a format function that accepts the date objects and also a format parameter that allows us to specify the format of the date we needed. R provides various format specifiers which are mentioned below in Table-

Note:To get the Today date, R provides a method called sys.Date() which returns the today date.

Weekday:

In this, we will look into the %a, %A, and %u specifiers which give the abbreviated weekday, full weekday, and numbered weekday starting from Monday.

Example:

# today date
date<-Sys.Date()

# abbreviated Day
format(date,format="%a")

# full Day
format(date,format="%A")

# weekday
format(date,format="%u")

Output

[1] "Sat"
[1] "Saturday"
[1] "6"

Date:

Let's look into the day, month, and year format specifiers to represent dates in different formats.

Example:

# today date
date<-Sys.Date()

# default format yyyy-mm-dd
date

# day in month
format(date,format="%d")

# month in year
format(date,format="%m")

# abbreviated month
format(date,format="%b")

# full month
format(date,format="%B")

# Date
format(date,format="%D")
format(date,format="%d-%b-%y")

Output

[1] "2022-04-02"
[1] "02"
[1] "04"
[1] "Apr"
[1] "April"
[1] "04/02/22"
[1] "02-Apr-22"

Year:

We can also able to format the year in different forms. %y, %Y, and %C are the few format specifiers that return the year without century, a year with century, and century of the given date respectively.

Example:

# today date
date<-Sys.Date()

# year without century
format(date,format="%y")

# year with century
format(date,format="%Y")

# century
format(date,format="%C")

Output

[1] "22"
[1] "2022"
[1] "20"