[R] Converting POSIXct format date to Character format

[Jim Lemon]

Hi ma015k3113,
I suspect that you are asking the wrong question.

# create an example data frame with an extra field
PLC<-read.table(text="YEAR_END_Date     EPS   junk
2010-09-10        .10 A
2009-08-10        .20 B",
header=TRUE,
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
# first, I think that you may already have the date in character format
# if you get this result, you don't need to convert it
sapply(PLC,"class")
YEAR_END_Date           EPS          junk
 "character"     "numeric"   "character"
# however, if you get this result
sapply(PLC,"class")
$YEAR_END_Date
[1] "POSIXlt" "POSIXt"

$EPS
[1] "numeric"

$junk
[1] "character"
# then you do have a POSIX date in the first field,
# so you can do this:
PLC$YEAR_END_Date<-format(PLC$YEAR_END_Date,format="%Y-%m-%d")
# then if you want to select those two fields for further processing
# use this expression
PLC[,c("YEAR_END_Date","EPS")]

Jim

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 6:11 AM e-mail ma015k3113 via R-help
<r-help using r-project.org> wrote:
>
> I have a data frame "PLC" which has two variables Year_END_Date   EPS
>
> YEAR_END_Date     EPS
> 2010-09-10        .10
> 2009-08-10        .20
>
> When I tried to convert Year_END_Date to character format using
>
> select(PLC, format(Year_END_Date,format = "%B %d, %Y"), EPS) I get an error
>
> Error: Can't subset columns that don't exist.
> x Column `Year_END_Date` doesn't exist.
>
> I tried using
>
> PLC_1 <- select(PLC, as.character(YEAR_END_DATE), EPS)
>
> I get the following error
>
> Error: Can't subset columns that don't exist.
> x Columns `2010-09-30`, `2009-09-30`, `2008-09-30`, `2007-09-30`, `2006-09-30`, etc. don't exist.
> Run `rlang::last_error()` to see where the error occurred.
>
> Can anyone please guide me what is happening and how can I resolve it?
>
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