An Example

Example Buggy Code

The Github repository associated with this webpage contains example buggy code for you to practice on and fixed code you can use to check yourself.

A Reprex of Date Issue

At one point in the debugging process, you may find that if you use the ifelse() function to deal with the date problem, your dates have been converted to integers. If you weren’t able to find any answers to your problem via a search engine or StackOverflow, you could post your issue to one of a variety of forums or mailing lists using a “reprex” or reproducible example. A reprex is code that anyone can run regardless of whether they have access to your data or not. It should also demonstrate the problem you are having. A reprex for the date issue might look like this:

date_strings = c('2025-01-01', '1/2/2025')

class(date_strings)

[1] "character"

dates = ifelse(grepl('\\/', date_strings),
               as.Date(date_strings, format='%m/%d/%Y'),
               as.Date(date_strings, format='%Y-%m-%d'))

print(dates)

[1] 20089 20090

class(dates)

[1] "numeric"