How to Convert a Date to a String

Displaying dates to the user is a common task you will do repeatidly. Like most languages, R provides us with date formatting options. In this article, we will learn how to convert a date to a string.

To convert a date to a string, we have two methods. We can use the as.character method or the format method. The format method allows use to sepecify a date format and is more useful in general.

today = Sys.Date()

as.character(today)

# [1] "2021-04-24"

We see that the as.character method givues us a default formatted date string. The format method does the same thing unless we pass a format string to the named parameter.

today = Sys.Date()

format(today)
# [1] "2021-04-24"

format(today, format = "%m/%d/%Y")
# [1] "04/24/2021"