r - Returning a Date from a Function Using sapply() -

i having issue dates in r.

i have data dates, however, format not consistent. depending on day of month stored dmmyyyy or ddmmyyyy. fix wrote small function (see below) takes string, checks length, reformats , returns date. use sapply(dates, formatdate) , according print outs works expected. resultant vector not contain same values.

head(dates) 10651 11566 15493 13727 15920 15617

i not sure happening here, insights?

formatdate <- function(x){    print(paste("entering format date ", x))    if (nchar(x) == 8){      print(paste("nchar = ", nchar(x)))      day   <- substr(x, 1, 2)     month <- substr(x, 3, 4)     year  <- substr(x, 5, 8)      print(paste("day = ", day, " month = ", month, " year = ", year))      x  <- paste(year,"-",month,"-",day, sep = "")      print(paste("date = ", x))      x  <- as.date(x, format = "%y-%m-%d")    }else if (nchar(x) == 7){      day   <- substr(x, 1, 1)     day   <- format(day, digits = 2)     day   <- gsub(" ", 0, day)     month <- substr(x, 2, 3)     year  <- substr(x, 4, 7)      x  <- paste(year,"-",month,"-",day, sep = "")     x  <- as.date(x, format = "%y-%m-%d")    } else {      x <- na    }    print(paste("returning", x))   flush.console()   return(x)   }  

this looks way complicated. if understand correctly, can this:

x <- c("1072015", "11072015") as.date(formatc(as.integer(x), width = 8, flag = 0), format = "%d%m%y") #[1] "2015-07-01" "2015-07-11"