Converting Character Column to Date in R with Lubridate

Question

I have a character column called date that holds data such as "January 15, 2015" I am trying to convert it to ymd format with the as.date function and I also tried the lubridate package. I have tried methods such as:

shootings$Date <- ymd(shootings$Date))

and

shootings$Date <- as.Date(as.character(shootings$Date))

I Would like it to look like 2013-01-01 (ymd) if possible. but I keep getting a parsing issue or the data just goes in N/A. Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

What you want is

mdy("January 15, 2015")
# [1] "2015-01-15"

The problem is that the function name has to correspond to your input format (mdy), not the desired output (ymd).

Answer 2

Using anytime:

# example data
x <- "January 15, 2015"

library(anytime)

anydate(x)
# [1] "2015-01-15"