Parsing and formatting dates

An essential early step in working with "raw" time series data (usually a data frame column or vector of observations) is to make sure all of your dates are in the same "date format". This is especially true when your data comes from multiple sources.

In this exercise, you'll practice formatting dates in two ways, using lubridate. First, you'll convert the dates object, a character vector, into a vector of class Date. Second, you'll reformat dates_order, an object which contains inconsistent date formatting.

The dates and dates_order objects, and the lubridate package, are loaded for you.