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I have a dataset with dates in the format like 20170911. Normally with other datasets I work with as.Date from the lubridate package and it works out pretty well. However, when I apply the as.Date function, it does not work out with this dataset. I get a date for the year which is impossible e.g. 57195-09-11 I don't get it, there seems to be a problem with the structure, I guess? Maybe it is because there are no separators included like . or - between the numbers? Can anyone help me out?

As an example

Datum <- c(20170911, 20151107, 20101131)
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  • Note as.Date is base R, not from the lubridate package. You may be thinking of lubridate::as_date() - the lubridate solution would be lubridate::as_date(as.character(Datum)). Also note your last date returns NA since November 31 is not a valid date. Commented Dec 4, 2024 at 14:34

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You should make them characters first and them specify the format of date

> as.Date(as.character(Datum), format = "%Y%m%d")
[1] "2017-09-11" "2015-11-07" NA
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Perfect. Thanks for helping me out.
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anydate will convert that:

library(anytime)

anydate(20170911)
## [1] "2017-09-11"
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library(lubridate)
ymd(Datum)

Result

[1] "2017-09-11" "2015-11-07" NA
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