R help - May 2011 - Format ddmmYYYY in date

Hello everybody,

I'm quite new in using R so please do not kill me if I ask stupid questions.

My problem is that I have a table containing dates in the first column of 10
years. These dates have the format ddmmYYYY at least in the csv-file. After
importing the file using read.table() R deletes the first character if it is
a zero. So e.g. if it's 01012010 R displays it as 1012010. Now of course I
cannot change the format of this column into date using as.date or strptime
or at least I don't no how, because R wants to have all entires to be the
same lenght. So it converts only entries like 10102000 to 10.10.2000 but
write NA for shorter entries.
How do I solve this problem? Is there a way to tell R not to delete the
first character even if it is a zero or to directly read the first column as
date?

Thank you,

cheers,
Simon

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smoff <simon.frey <at> boku.ac.at> writes:
> My problem is that I have a table containing dates in the first column of
10
> years. These dates have the format ddmmYYYY at least in the csv-file. After
> importing the file using read.table() R deletes the first character if it
is
> a zero.
 [snip]
> How do I solve this problem? Is there a way to tell R not to delete the
> first character even if it is a zero or to directly read the first column
as
> date?
  See the "colClasses" argument of ?read.table ...

  (added a little bit of text to make gmane happy)