library(datefixR)This vignette describes the functionality of datefixR in more detail than the README. DatefixR is a lightweight package consisting of a two user-accessible functions, fix_date() and fix_dates(), which converts dates written in different formats into R’s built-in Date class. The former is designed to modify single character objects whilst the latter is intended for modifying columns of a data frame (or tibble).
Practically, this package is most useful when handling date data which has been supplied via text boxes (instead of a date-specific input with a consistent date format). However, this package may also be useful to validate the format of date data (see date and month imputation).
Firstly, we will demonstrate date standardization without imputation. We consider a data frame with two columns of dates in differing formats with no missing data.
| id | some.dates | some.more.dates |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 02/05/92 | 01 03 2015 |
| 2 | 01-04-2020 | 02/05/00 |
| 3 | 1996/05/01 | 01/05/1990 |
| 4 | 2020-05-01 | 03-Dec-2012 |
| 5 | 02-04-96 | 02 April 2020 |
fix_dates() requires two arguments, df, a data frame (or tibble) object and col.names, a character vector containing the names of columns to be standardized. By default, the first column of the data frame is assumed to contain row IDs. These IDs are used if a warning or error is raised to assist with locating the source of the error. The ID column can also be manually provided via the id argument.
The output from this function is a data frame object with the selected date columns now belonging to the Date class.
fixed.dates <- fix_dates(bad.dates,
c("some.dates", "some.more.dates"))
knitr::kable(fixed.dates)| id | some.dates | some.more.dates |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1992-05-02 | 2015-03-01 |
| 2 | 2020-04-01 | 2000-05-02 |
| 3 | 1996-05-01 | 1990-05-01 |
| 4 | 2020-05-01 | 2012-12-03 |
| 5 | 1996-04-02 | 2020-04-02 |
datefixR can handle many different formats including -, /, or white space separation, year-first or day-first, and month supplied as a number, an abbreviation or full length name. The most notable current omission is the month-first format of dates commonly seen in the US, however this format may be supported in the future.
fix_date() is similar to fix_dates() but only applies to a single character object.
fix_date("01 02 2014")
#> [1] "2014-02-01"Functions in datefixR assume day-first instead of month-first when day, month, and year are all given (unless year is given first). However this behavior can be modified by passing format = "mdy" to function calls.
fix_date("01 02 2014", format = "mdy")
#> [1] "2014-01-02"By default, datefixR imputes missing months as July, and missing days of the month as the first day. As such,
| id | some.date |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1992 |
converts to
imputed.dates <- fix_dates(impute.dates, "some.date")
knitr::kable(imputed.dates)| id | some.date |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1992-07-01 |
The argument for defaulting to July is 1-2 July is halfway through the year (on a non leap year). Therefore assuming the year supplied is indeed correct, you are only a maximum of 6 months off from the true date. However, this behavior can be changed by supplying the day.impute and month.impute arguments with an integer corresponding to the desired day and month. For example, day.impute = 1 and month.impute = 1 results in the first day of January being imputed instead.
imputed.dates <- fix_dates(impute.dates,
"some.date",
day.impute = 1,
month.impute = 1)
knitr::kable(imputed.dates)| id | some.date |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1992-01-01 |
The imputation mechanism can also be modified to impute NA if a month or day is missing by setting day.impute or month.impute to NA. This will also result in a warning being raised.
imputed.dates <- fix_dates(impute.dates,
"some.date",
month.impute = NA)
#> Warning: NA imputed for subject 1 (date: 1992)
knitr::kable(imputed.dates)| id | some.date |
|---|---|
| 1 | NA |
Finally, imputation can be prevented by setting day.impute or month.impute to NULL. This will result in an error being raised if the day or month are missing respectively.
imputed.dates <- fix_dates(impute.dates,
"some.date",
month.impute = NULL)
# ERRORday.impute and month.impute can also be passed to fix_date() for similar functionality.
fix_date("2014", day.impute = 1, month.impute = 1)
#> [1] "2014-01-01"If you use this package in your research, please consider citing datefixR. An up-to-date citation can be obtained by running
citation("datefixR")
#>
#> To cite datefixR in publications use:
#>
#> Constantine-Cooke, Nathan . datefixR: Fix Really Messy Dates in R. R
#> package version 0.1.4. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5655311.
#> https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=datefixR
#>
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#>
#> @Manual{,
#> title = {{datefixR}: Fix Really Messy Dates in {R}},
#> author = {Nathan Constantine-Cooke},
#> url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=datefixR},
#> doi = {10.5281/zenodo.5655311},
#> note = {R package version 0.1.4},
#> }