Here is an example. # print today's date today <- Sys.Date() format(today, format="%B %d %Y") "June 20 2007" Date Conversion Character to Date You can use the as.Date( ) function to convert character data to dates. The format is as.Date(x , "format"), where x is the character data and format gives the appropriate format. # convert date info in format 'mm/dd/yyyy' strDates <- c("01/05/1965", "08/16