To create a Date object from a simple character string in R, you can use the as.Date() function. The character string has to obey a format that can be defined using a set of symbols (the examples correspond to 13 January, 1982):

%Y: 4-digit year (1982)
%y: 2-digit year (82)
%m: 2-digit month (01)
%d: 2-digit day of the month (13)
%A: weekday (Wednesday)
%a: abbreviated weekday (Wed)
%B: month (January)
%b: abbreviated month (Jan)

The following R commands will all create the same Date object for the 13th day in January of 1982:

as.Date("1982-01-13")
as.Date("Jan-13-82", format = "%b-%d-%y")
as.Date("13 January, 1982", format = "%d %B, %Y")

Notice that the first line here did not need a format argument, because by default R matches your character string to the formats "%Y-%m-%d" or "%Y/%m/%d".

In addition to creating dates, you can also convert dates to character strings that use a different date notation. For this, you use the format() function. Try the following lines of code:

today <- Sys.Date()
format(Sys.Date(), format = "%d %B, %Y")
format(Sys.Date(), format = "Today is a %A!")