Dates in R, the easy way

Today’s #rstats “this was easier than I thought” moment: zoo::as.yearmon()

Author

Affiliation

Cara Thompson

Building Stories with Data

Working on a table where the headers are originally formatted “2023-01-27” and we want it to format headers as “Jan 2023”.

Turns out, it’s easier than I thought (zoo accepts 01 or 1 for month)!

zoo::as.yearmon(c("2020-10-01", "2021-06-02", "2021-5-02", "2022-11-5"))

Now for the table, we’re using {flextable} to format things. My first try of using zoo::as.yearmon() as is, but that didn’t quite go to plan.

Instead, pasting the outcome worked: paste(zoo::as.yearmon(my_dates))

Voila!

Table with original formatting of dates

my_data %>%
  flextable() %>%
#  more_flextable_formatting

Table with dates formatted as decimals (e.g. 2020.333, 2020.75, …)

my_data %>%
  flextable() %>%
  delete_part(part = "header") %>%
  add_header_row(values = c("", zoo::as.yearmon(my_dates)))  %>%
#  more_flextable_formatting

Table with dates formatted as desired (e.g. May 2020, Oct 2020, …)

my_data %>%
  flextable() %>%
  delete_part(part = "header") %>%
  add_header_row(values = c("", paste(zoo::as.yearmon(my_dates))))  %>%
#  more_flextable_formatting