r - format a Date column in a Data Frame

Question

I've the following data from a data frame

Name,JoiningDate,AmtPaid
Joe,12/31/09,1000
Amy,10/28/09,100
John,05/06/10,200

The Joining Date is coming in as a factor (when I sapply). How can I convert this to date and then sort on JoiningDate?

Answer 1

This should do it (where df is your dataframe)

df$JoiningDate <- as.Date(df$JoiningDate , format = "%m/%d/%y")

df[order(df$JoiningDate ),]