title: Unable to convert this Character type to a proper Date type in R
body: <p>I have a data set that has a column for dates (emp2$hiredate) which is in char format. While converting it to Date, I'm getting the following error :</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; date1 &lt;- emp2$hiredate[2]
  
  &gt; str(date1)
  chr "20FEB1981"
  
  &gt; as.POSIXct(date1)
  Error in as.POSIXlt.character(x, tz, ...) : 
  character string is not in a standard unambiguous format
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How do I solve this problem?</p>