How to parse a date from its string representation in R?

To parse a date from its string representation in R, we should use the lubridate package of the tidyverse collection. This package offers various functions for parsing a string and extracting the standard date from it based on the initial date pattern in that string. These functions are ymd(), ymd_hm(), ymd_hms(), dmy(), dmy_hm(), dmy_hms(), mdy(), mdy_hm(), mdy_hms(), etc., where y, m, d, h, m, and s correspond to year, month, day, hours, minutes, and seconds, respectively.

For example, if we run the dmy() function passing to it any of the strings “05-11-2023”, “05/11/2023” or “05.11.2023”, representing the same date, we’ll receive the same result: 2023-11-05. This is because in all three cases, despite having different dividing symbols, we actually have the same pattern: the day followed by the month followed by the year.