Try this: Lines <- "Date,Temp 1-Apr-1997,50 3-Sept-2001,60"
library(zoo) # function to reduce 4 char mos to 3 char convert.date <- function(x, format) as.Date(sub("(-...).-", "\\1-", x), format) # z <- read.zoo("myfile.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",", FUN = convert.date, format = "%d-%b-%Y") z <- read.zoo(textConnection(Lines), header = TRUE, sep = ",", FUN = convert.date, format = "%d-%b-%Y") plot(z) If the dates are actually three letters, i.e. Sep and not Sept, then you could eliminate convert.date and simplify the read.zoo line to: z <- read.zoo(textConnection(Lines), header = TRUE, sep = ",", format = "%d-%b-%Y") See the zoo package documentation and its three vignettes as well as ?read.zoo ?strptime and ?plot.zoo and also look at the dates article in R News 4/1. On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Williams, Robin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > Firstly I appologise if this question has been answered previously, > however searching of the archives and the internet generally has not > yielded any results. > > I am looking in to the effects of summer weather conditions > (temperature, humidity etc), on the incidences of a breathing disorder > brought on through smoking (COPD). I am fairly new to R and completely > new to the idea of writing R scripts, subsetting dataframes etc. I am > working on a 12 week summer placement at the Met Office, UK, having just > finished my second year of a mathematics course at university. > > Basically I have data between January 1 1997 and December 31 2007. > However as I am only interest in the summer months (which I have defined > to be between May 1 and September 30), I would like to extract the > relevant data in R in a timely manner. Obviously I could go and open my > csv files in excel, cut and paste the relevant data, etc, however I > would like to maximise R's potential as I feel it will stand me in > better stead in the long run. > Currently the dates are in the form > 1-Apr-1997, > 3-Sept-2001, > etc. > I will create a data.frame with date as one of the variables, the > others being (initially) temperature, humidity, and Admissions (the > number of hospital admissions for COPD exaserbations). > Please could somebody tell me if there is a simple way to extract the > data I want, and if so perhaps a sample command to get me going? Do I > first need to format the dates to some numeric-only format? As I say, I > could use Excel to create the files in the right format, but I will be > dealing with a lot more variables in the future (perhaps up to 8) and so > this will become a pain-staking process. > > Please reply either on or off list. > > Many thanks for any help. > Robin Williams > Met Office summer intern - Health Forecasting > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > 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. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.