R help - Aug 2010 - How can I read date format '02-Jan-02' ?

Hello,

I am trying to read a database exported from SAS.

It is form of csv, and the date format reads '02-Feb-99'.
I used following code to convert character to date format,
db$dob<-as.Date(db$dob, format="%d-%b-%y").
but it doesn't work, only seems NA.

What's wrong with this code?
Thank you in advance.

Best,

Dong-Hee Koh

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On 08/16/2010 03:27 PM, Dong-Hee Koh wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to read a database exported from SAS.
>
> It is form of csv, and the date format reads '02-Feb-99'.
> I used following code to convert character to date format,
> db$dob<-as.Date(db$dob, format="%d-%b-%y").
> but it doesn't work, only seems NA.
>
> What's wrong with this code?
Hi Dong-Hee,
The problem is not with your command, but most likely the reading in of 
the data. If you just use read.csv, your dates will probably be read in 
as factors. You can correct this at the reading stage:

db<-read.csv(<filename>,as.is=TRUE)

or at the conversion stage:

db$dob<-as.Date(as.character(db$dob,"%d-%b-%y"))

Jim