Guess date format of a character string

The motivation behind this is that as.Date does not handle correctly its format argument, e.g. as.Date("01-12-2001", format = "%Y-%m-%d") returns 1-12-20. Tries to match a single character string against regular expressions representing potential date formats. Returns the format as something that can be processed by as.Date if a match is found, and NULL otherwise.

Usage

date_i_find_format(x)

Value

If no matching format can be found, the function returns NULL; if a matching format is found, the function returned the matched regular expression (clean date) and its format compatible with as.Date.

Author

Thibaut Jombart