5.6 Format Dates

20220108

A human readable way of formatting a date is with the lubridate::stamp() function. It takes a string argument as a template and looks for a date in there and then generates a function that uses base::format() to format the date within the template string.

stamp('The best day was 17 Jan 1999')

The function can be applied to an argument to format the supplied date using the template:

stamp('The best day was 17 Jan 1999', quiet=TRUE)(today())

## [1] "The best day was 14 Dec 2024"

Essentially, the above code uses lubridate::stamp() to create a function that will do the following base::format():

format(today(), format="The best day was %d %b %Y")

## [1] "The best day was 14 Dec 2024"

To get rid of a leading 0 in the day (i.e., 8 instead of 08) we can add a - to the format:

format(ymd("20220108"), format="The best day was %d %b %Y")

## [1] "The best day was 08 Jan 2022"

format(ymd("20220108"), format="The best day was %-d %b %Y")

## [1] "The best day was 8 Jan 2022"

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