set dates manually or automatically
set_date(.data, ..., date_fn = lubridate::ymd)dataframe
tidyselect
a function to convert to a date object
tibble
note: can be called without any ... arguments and instead automatically determines which character columns
are actually dates, then proceeds to set them. It checks for the date specified in date_fn and also ymd_hms.
On auto detect mode, it sets ymd_hms output to ymd dates instead of datetimes with hms. This is because of the common occurrence
of trying to extract a ymd date from an excel workbook, and having it come with extra 00:00:00. If you need a datetime, manually
supply the appropriate lubridate function.
Auto mode is experimental. Commonly detected error is a long character string of integers being interpreted as a date.
tibble::tibble(date_col1 = c("20190101", "20170205"),
date_col2 = c("20201015", "20180909"),
not_date_col = c("a345", "b040")) -> t1
t1
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#> date_col1 date_col2 not_date_col
#> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 20190101 20201015 a345
#> 2 20170205 20180909 b040
t1 %>%
set_date()
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#> date_col1 date_col2 not_date_col
#> <date> <date> <chr>
#> 1 2019-01-01 2020-10-15 a345
#> 2 2017-02-05 2018-09-09 b040
t1 %>%
set_date(date_col1)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#> date_col1 date_col2 not_date_col
#> <date> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 2019-01-01 20201015 a345
#> 2 2017-02-05 20180909 b040