Extract Day from Date in R (Example)
This post explains how to return only the day of a Date object in R programming.
Table of contents:
Let’s take a look at some R codes in action…
Creation of Exemplifying Data
As a first step, we have to construct some data that we can use in the example code below:
x <- "2022-10-17" # Create example date x # Print example date # "2022-10-17"
The previous output of the RStudio console shows that our example data object contains a character string showing a date (i.e. the 17th of October 2022).
Example: Extracting Day from Date Object Using format() Function
This example explains how to extract the day of a date in R. First, we have to apply the as.Date function to format our input character string to a Date object:
x_formatted <- as.Date(x, format = "%Y-%m-%d") # Convert character to date x_formatted # Print Date object # "2022-10-17"
As you can see, the output looks exactly the same as our input character string. However, the class is different:
class(x_formatted) # Check class # "Date"
Our updated data has the class “Date”.
Now, we can apply the format command to return only the day of our Date object:
x_day <- format(x_formatted, format = "%d") # Extract day from date x_day # Print day # "17"
The day of our Date object is 17.
Video & Further Resources
Would you like to know more about dates in R? Then I can recommend to have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. I’m explaining the R syntax of this tutorial in the video.
The YouTube video will be added soon.
Furthermore, you may want to have a look at the related tutorials of this homepage. A selection of articles is shown below.
In this tutorial you learned how to get the day of a vector of dates in the R programming language. Let me know in the comments section, if you have additional questions. Furthermore, please subscribe to my email newsletter in order to get updates on the newest articles.