Remove part of the string in R - dropping some words from it

Question

I have a column in dataframe which should represent the date, named "taken", and looks like this:

taken

Sat Jan 01 15:30:27 CET 2011

Thu Jan 06 00:54:26 CET 2011

Sat Jan 08 19:49:02 CET 2011

Sun Jan 16 09:57:16 CET 2011

etc (more than 30000 rows)

Now, I need to change class from factor to date, but I haven't found solution for this kind of format. Since it would be easier with date looking like this:

taken

Jan 01 2011

Jan 06 2011

Jan 08 2011

Jan 16 2011

...How could I drop some words from a string (obviously, Mon/Tue... time and CET in this case) to change it into date?

Answer 1

I wouldn't use them as time at first place. What would I do:

String <- "Sat Jan 01 15:30:27 CET 2011"

As your dates have same number of elements in them we could just count what part of the String we would like to get.

date <- substr(String, start = 5, stop = 10)

year <- substr(String, start =25 , stop = 28)

Attach them togheter

final <- paste(date,year, sep = " ")

as.Date(final, format = "%b %d %Y")

Little bit more information about as.Date https://www.statmethods.net/input/dates.html I hope it helps you :)