programming-examples/r/To read in a simple data file where date data is present.r
2019-11-18 14:03:28 +01:00

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R

# Goal: To read in a simple data file where date data is present.
# Suppose you have a file "x.data" which looks like this:
# 1997-07-04,3.1,4
# 1997-07-05,7.2,19
# 1997-07-07,1.7,2
# 1997-07-08,1.1,13
A <- read.table("x.data", sep=",",
col.names=c("date", "my1", "my2"))
A$date <- as.Date(A$date, format="%Y-%m-%d")
# Say ?strptime to learn how to use "%" to specify
# other date formats. Two examples --
# "15/12/2002" needs "%d/%m/%Y"
# "03 Jun 1997" needs "%d %b %Y"
# Actually, if you're using the ISO 8601 date format, i.e.
# "%Y-%m-%d", that's the default setting and you don't need to
# specify the format.
A$newcol <- A$my1 + A$my2 # Makes a new column in A
newvar <- A$my1 - A$my2 # Makes a new R object "newvar"
A$my1 <- NULL # Delete the `my1' column
summary(A) # Makes summary statistics