Character conversion to date using lubridate

tidyverse
1

I rather new to R, so please excuse any errors. I've only posted a few times.

I have large dataset in tidy format. The Month column in the dateframe is in character format. I am trying to convert the Month column to a date format for each month so I can graph the timeseries without having to scale the x-axis using discrete limits. The simple example is as follows:

library(tidyverse)
library(lubridate)

# character string as months
Month=c("January", "February", "March")
# convert character to date format
Month <- Month %>% as_date(Month)

But I receive the following error:
Warning message: All formats failed to parse. No formats found.

Is there a way to convert the character to date?

Thanks

2

Perhaps there is a cleaner way to do this, but I would use the following.

library(lubridate)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'lubridate'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     date
# character string as months
Month=c("January", "February", "March")
# convert character to date format
Month <- as_date(paste0("2019-", Month, "-01"))
class(Month)
#> [1] "Date"
Month
#> [1] "2019-01-01" "2019-02-01" "2019-03-01"

Created on 2019-04-23 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)

3

Month is not enough to identify a date. One way to do it is to use something like @FJCC suggested. Another is to use something like tsibble::yearmonth(). In absence of year, it'll default to year 1400:

tsibble::yearmonth(c("January", "February", "March"))
#> [1] "1400 Jan" "1400 Feb" "1400 Mar"

Created on 2019-04-24 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)

4

This was helpful. Thank-you.

5

Thank-you for the feedback. It worked with the code you posted.