On Thu, 11 Jun 2020, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
I would add to this that in an important data set I was working with, most of the dates were dd/mm/yy but some of them were mm/dd/yy and that led to the realisation that I couldn't *tell* for about 40% of the dates which they were. If they were all one or the other, no worries, but when you have people from mixed backgrounds writing in mixed formats, you have a problem.
Richard, Ouch! While I've not had data sets with this problem I've had many that were extracted from spreadsheets that had a mix of date formats mm/dd/yyyy, mm-dd-yyyy, and other strange strings. That's why I encourage my clients to use a database rather than spreadsheets for their environmental data. Regards, Rich ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
