title: error message: do not know how to convert 'dataFrame$col' to class “Date”
body: <p>I have a data frame with records from the month of October 2017. Column 6 has the dates as a character vector.</p>
  
  <p>This is what it looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; october2017[1:6,1:6]
          V1        V2 V3  V4    V5        V6
  1 89108060 IN0000005 P2 RK1 CA1-R 10/1/2017
  2 10503818 IN0000014 P2 RK1  CA31 10/2/2017
  3 89108152 765000054 P2 RK1  CA31 10/3/2017
  4 89108152 765000197 P2 RK1  CA31 10/4/2017
  5 89108206 200000162 P2 RK1  CA31 10/5/2017
  6 89108206 100001098 P2 RK1  CA31 10/6/2017
  &gt; class(october2017$V6)
  [1] "character"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The actual data frame is much larger than this. What I want to do is create a new column to denote the day of the week that matches each date and add it to the data frame. If the date is "10/1/2017" I want the new column denoting the day of the week to show "Sunday" in that row.</p>
  
  <p>This is what I want the data frame to look like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; october2017[1:6,1:7]
          V1        V2 V3  V4    V5        V6     V7
  1 89108060 IN0000005 P2 RK1 CA1-R 10/1/2017 Sunday
  2 10503818 IN0000014 P2 RK1  CA31 10/2/2017 Monday
  3 89108152 765000054 P2 RK1  CA31 10/3/2017 Tuesday
  4 89108152 765000197 P2 RK1  CA31 10/4/2017 Wednesday
  5 89108206 200000162 P2 RK1  CA31 10/5/2017 Thursday
  6 89108206 100001098 P2 RK1  CA31 10/6/2017 Friday
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is what I tried:
      newcol = weekdays(as.Date(october2017$v6, format="%m/%d/%Y"))
      october2017 = cbind(october2017,newcol, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)</p>
  
  <p>This is the error message I get when I try to run the first line of this code:
  Error in as.Date.default(october2017$v6, format = "%m/%d/%Y") : 
    do not know how to convert 'october2017$v6' to class “Date”</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone help me understand why this is happening?</p>