Parsing Dates and Time – Part 1: Exercises

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In the exercises below we will work with anytime and lubridate package to see how to manipulate date and time
Answers to the exercises are available here.

If you obtained a different (correct) answer than those listed on the solutions page, please feel free to post your answer as a comment on that page.

Exercise 1
create a vector 22_mar_2018 as a vector which is like
mar_22_2018 <- c("mar-22-2018","2018/03/22", "2018-03-22","22 mar 2018")
parse it with anytime function from anytime package
Exercise 2

anydate/anytime bydefault converts to the local time zone,use asUTC to TRUE to set the timezone as UTC to see the current time in UTC and date as well

Exercise 3

R has builtin datetime object ,convert mar 22 2018 12:30:00 to R datetime .

Exercise 4
you can see the timezone of your system using sys.timezone() method , now do the prev exercise again but set the time zone to “Europe/London”

Exercise 5

install and load the library lubridate into your R session.
create a string “2018-mar-22” ,convert it to R date object (ISO 8601 ) using ymd function from lubridate . ymd parses a date like string into R’s date format if

Learn more about Data Pre-Processing in the online course R Data Pre-Processing & Data Management – Shape your Data!. In this course you will learn how to:

  • Work with different packages that help shape dates and times,
  • learn about the lubridate package for quick and easy dates and times,
  • and much more

Exercise 6

use dmy function to convert a date string “22-mar-2018” where string is of the form of dd-mon-yyyy or similar to R’s date format .

Exercise 7

use mdy function to convert string ” mar-22-2018″ to R’s date format

Exercise 8
There are other similar functions like dym,mdy etc in lubridate , play with them to get a feel of the different date parsing functions in lubridate.

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