Skip to contents

Extract date components as tokens

Source: R/preparer_tokens.R
date_tokens.Rd

date_tokens() parses dates and extracts specified components (year, month, day) as separate tokens. This is useful for flexible date matching where you want to match on specific date parts rather than full dates.

Usage

date_tokens(
  x,
  components = c("year", "month", "day"),
  format = NULL,
  orders = c("ymd", "dmy", "mdy")
)

Arguments

x

A character or Date vector containing dates to tokenize.

components

Character vector specifying which date components to extract. Can include "year", "month", and/or "day". Defaults to all three.

format

Optional format string for parsing (passed to as.Date()). If NULL (default), attempts automatic parsing via lubridate.

orders

Optional character vector of lubridate order specifications (e.g., c("dmy", "mdy", "ymd")). Used when format = NULL. Defaults to c("ymd", "dmy", "mdy").

Value

A list of character vectors, one per input element. Each vector contains the requested date components as strings. Unparseable dates return an empty character vector with a warning.

Details

Components are returned as zero-padded strings:

  • "year" – 4-digit year (e.g., "2023")

  • "month" – 2-digit month (e.g., "01", "12")

  • "day" – 2-digit day (e.g., "05", "31")

The order of tokens in the output follows the order of components.

See also

normalize_date() to match whole dates, approximate_date() to match on coarser periods.

Other date preparers: approximate_date(), normalize_date()

Examples

date_tokens("2023-12-31")
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "2023" "12"   "31"  
#> 
# list(c("2023", "12", "31"))

date_tokens("31.12.2023", components = c("year", "month"))
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "2023" "12"  
#> 
# list(c("2023", "12"))

date_tokens("12/31/2023", components = "year")
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "2023"
#> 
# list("2023")

date_tokens(c("2023-01-15", "15.06.2023"))
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "2023" "01"   "15"  
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "2023" "06"   "15"  
#> 
# list(c("2023", "01", "15"), c("2023", "06", "15"))