Question

I have been given a csv with a column called month as a char variable with the first three letters of the month. E.g.:

"Jan", "Feb","Mar",..."Dec"

Is there any way to convert this to a numeric representation of the month, 1 to 12, or even a type that is in a date format?

Answer 1

Use match and the predefined vector month.abb:

tst <- c("Jan","Mar","Dec")
match(tst,month.abb)
[1]  1  3 12