month.abb[] is resulting in incorrect results
Andrew Mclaughlin 
I have the following data set. I am trying to split the date_1 field into month and days. Then converting the month number to a month name.
date_1,no_of_births_1
1/1,1482
2/2,1213
3/23,1220
4/4,1319
5/11,1262
6/18,1271I am using month.abb[] for converting the month number to name. But instead of providing month name for each value of month number, the result is generating wrong array.
for example: month.abb[2] is generating Apr instead of Feb.
date_1 no_of_births_1 V1 V2 month
1 1/1 1482 1 1 Jan
2 2/2 1213 2 2 Apr
3 3/23 1220 3 23 May
4 4/4 1319 4 4 Jun
5 5/11 1262 5 11 Jul
6 6/18 1271 6 18 Augbelow is the code i am using,
birthday<-read.csv("Birthday_s.csv",header = TRUE)
birthday$date_1<-as.character(birthday$date_1)
#split the data
listx<-sapply(birthday$date_1,function(x) strsplit(x,"/"))
library(base)
#convert to data frame
mat<-as.data.frame(matrix(unlist(listx),ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE))
#combine birthday and mat
birthday2<-cbind(birthday,mat)
#convert month number to month name
birthday2$month<-sapply(birthday2$V1, function(x) month.abb[as.numeric(x)])1 Answer
When I run your code, I get the correct months. However, your code is more complicated than necessary. Here are two ways to extract month and day from date_1:
First, when you read the data, use stringsAsFactors=FALSE, which prevents strings from getting converted to factors.
birthday <- read.csv("Birthday_s.csv",header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)Extract month and days using date functions:
library(lubridate)
birthday$month = month(as.POSIXct(birthday$date_1, format="%m/%d"), abbr=TRUE, label=TRUE)
birthday$day = day(as.POSIXct(birthday$date_1, format="%m/%d"))Extract month and days using Regular Expressions:
birthday$month = month.abb[as.numeric(gsub("([0-9]{1,2}).*", "\\1", birthday$date_1))]
birthday$day = as.numeric(gsub(".*/([0-9]{1,2}$)", "\\1", birthday$date_1))
